Data model and a query language for multimedia documents databases

Abstract

A multimedia application involves information that may be in a form of video, images, audio, text and graphics, need to be stored, retrieved and manipulated in large databases. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented database schema that supports multimedia documents and their temporal, spatial and logical structures. We present a document example and show how the schema can address all the structures described. We also present a multimedia query specification language that can be used to describe a multimedia content portion to be retrieved from the database. The language provides means by which the user can specify the information on the media as well as the temporal and spatial relationships among these media.