General Research Issues in Multimedia Database Systems

in dealing with multimedia data are similar to those that arise in handling other nontraditional data such as spatial, image, temporal, text, document, and scientific. We focus here on multimedia database issues, which we hope can serve as a starting point for a wider discussion. Our examples are often taken from the spatial domain as this is where we have the greatest expertise, although these issues are far more general. Why do we want a database? The natural and simple answer is to be able to store and retrieve data efficiently. Notice the emphasis on retrieval. We should no