A data model and a query languagefor 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 adress 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 temoral and spatial relationships among these media.

UMQL: A Unified Multimedia Query Language

“…If S 1 and S 2 are WHERE conditional expressions, so are S 1 AND S 2 , S 1 OR S 2 and NOT S 1 The normal conditions are used to specify the conditions of conventional attributes, which are compatible with where conditions of SQL; the structure conditions are used to specify the inner structures of multimedia data; the feature conditions are used to specify the bottom-level and other userdefined features of multimedia objects; the spatiotemporal conditions are used to specify the spatiotemporal relationships between multimedia objects contained in multimedia data. Definition 3 (Structure condition) Defined as follows:…”

“…The expression is true, if and only if, there exist (a 1 + a 2 + … + a n ) objects in S, a 1 objects of these objects satisfy C(x 1 ), a 2 objects of the rest satisfy C(x 2 ), and so on. It is allowable that in the following query specification, to use x k to represent all of a k objects and x 1 [1],…, x 1 [a 1 ],…, x n [1],…, x n [a n ] to represent each object respectively.…”

“…In recent years, there have been many multimedia query language proposals [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], which can be classified into three categories: entirely new and specialized languages [1][2][3][4], languages based on logic or functional programming approach [5,6], and languages that are extensions of SQL [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. One problem with a brand new multimedia query language is the lack of acceptance by users.…”