A Visual Query Facility for Multimedia Databases

Multimedia databases store large data objects with complex spatial and temporal relationships. For users to easily and effectively access and make use of this large information space, there is a need for an interactive user interface to act as an intermediary between the database and the user. Many existing multimedia systems provide a browsing-based user interface for their users. However, with large information spaces, browsing does not provide an efficient mechanism for accessing the database. Thus, there is a need for a query facility which enables users to pose queries to the database, and, directly, retrieve information of interest. This research determines the user interface requirements of multimedia information systems and provides a template solution. That is, it presents an easy and efficient way of accessing a multimedia database. This is achieved through a visual query facility which provides a rich visual query interface as well as a browsing facility. The visual query fa..

The Logical Design Of A Multimedia Database For A News-On-Demand Application

We describe the design of a multimedia database for a distributed news-on-demand multimedia information system. News-on-demand is an application that utilizes broadband network services to deliver news articles to subscribers in the form of multimedia documents. Different news providers insert articles into the database, which is then accessed by remote users over a broadband network. Multimedia documents are composite objects where the component objects have spatial and temporal relationships which need to be captured in the database. Modeling of multimedia documents involves three issues: (1) modeling of individual document components (i.e., monomedia objects such as text, images, etc), (2) modeling of the document structure, and (3) modeling of the presentation structure. We take an object-oriented approach to dealing with these issues. Within (1), our research has so far concentrated on text. We use an annotation based scheme where entire text is stored as a single document and th..

Database Management Support for a News-on-demand Application

We describe the type system component of a database management system that supports a multimedia news-on-demand application. The type system is an object-oriented one that represents document structure according to the SGML and HyTime standards. End-users access the news database by using a visual query interface. We also describe current work to generalize the database type system to accommodate arbitrary SGML/HyTime compliant multimedia documents. Such a generalized type system would support a broad range of multimedia applications