Evolvable Media Repositories: An Evolutionary System to Retrieve and Ever-Renovate Related Media Web Content

Abstract

The paper tackles the question of evolvable media reposito- ries, i.e., local pools of media files that are retrieved over the Internet and that are ever-renovated with new, related files in an evolutionary fash- ion. The herein proposed method encodes genotypic space by virtue of simple undirected graphs of natural language tokens that represent web queries without employing fitness functions or other evaluation/selection schemata. Once a first population is seeded, a series of modular crawlers query the particular World Wide Web repositories of interest for both media content and assorted meta-data. Then, a series of attached intelli- gent comprehenders analyse the retrieved content in order to eventually generate new genetic representations, and the cycle is repeated. Such a method is generic, scalable and modular, and can be made fit the pur- poses of a wide array of applications in all sorts of disparate contextual and functional scenarios. The paper features a formal description of the method, gives implementation guidelines, and presents example usages.