GooSeeker

While there are a few large image search engines and image aggregation sites, you may want to build up an online gallery with a specific theme. MetaSeeker can help you on this, since it has advanced capabilities to extract images belonging to a specific theme. It should be bore in mind that MetaSeeker can not recognize the meanings of images or textual contents autonomously with artificial intelligence. In other words MetaSeeker can not tell if an image belongs to a specific theme. You should tell MetaSeeker where to find the images belonging to the theme. How to define extraction rules for extracting images are stated in detail in MetaStudio User's Guide or MetaSeeker Cook Book.

Notes: MetaSeeker extracts image's URLs instead of files. In other words, the real images are not downloaded by MetaSeeker. To download image files or not depends on how to manipulate the extraction results.

There are the following ways to integrate extracted images to an online gallery:

1. MetaSeeker is asked to extract both image URLs and their presentation styles, i.e. a fragment of a HTML document making up of IMG elements and their attributes. During integrating the extraction results, the fragments are copied directly onto specific locations of gallery's pages. In fact, the image files are not stored on the gallery site. When a visitor browse a gallery's page, images are download directly from the original sources.
2. MetaSeeker is asked to extract only image URLs, i.e., the value of an HTML IMG's attribute src. During integrating the extraction results, new IMG elements are created with their attribute src set with the extracted values. In this case, the image files are not stored on the gallery site too.
3. MetaSeeker is asked to extract only image URLs, i.e., the value of an HTML IMG's attribute src. Thereafter another software downloads the image files from the sources denoted by the extracted results. In this case, real image files are stored on the gallery site.

Figure 1(Enlarge)

There are the following components:

• Image sources: the sources contain images belonging to interested themes;
• MetaSeeker toolkits: A cloud is depicted because MetaSeeker toolkits are always deployed distributedly in a network. The MetaSeeker toolkits extract image URLs one by one and store them in XML files.
• Image integrator: The component read the extraction result files and integrate the images with the online gallery. The logic of this component may change for above three different integration ways. For example, the component may download all image files in the third way. The components in this type are from 3rd parties. We can recommend the most suitable one for a specific solution based upon successful cases.
• Online gallery: The site collects images belonging to an interested theme.