MediaView : A Semantic View Mechanism for Multimedia Modeling

Abstract

The semantics of multimedia data, which features context-dependency and media-independency, is of vital importance to multimedia applications but inadequately supported by the state-of-the-art database technology. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing MediaView as an extended object-oriented view mechanism to bridge the "semantic gap" between conventional databases and semantics-intensive multimedia applications. This mechanism captures the dynamic semantics of multimedia using a modeling construct named media view, which formulates a customized context where heterogeneous media objects with similar/related semantics are characterized by additional properties and user-defined semantic relationships. View operators are proposed for the manipulation and derivation of media views. The feasibility of MediaView is validated by an experimental implementation, and its usefulness and elegancy is demonstrated by its application in a multimodal information retrieval system.

Multimedia Data Modeling Through a Semantic View Mechanism

“…In the case of retrieving multimedia data, the semantics of a media object are relative to the user's goal and knowledge background [16,33,34]. The scenario depicted in Figure 7 shows how a media object is interpreted and classified to a concept.…”

“…To address these limitations, much work has been proposed towards different aspects regarding the management of multimedia, including data models [2,16,20], presentation [14], indexing [7], and query processing [5]. Among all the data models, the object-oriented approach is generally regarded as the most suitable choice for modeling multimedia data, mainly because of its great modeling capacity and its extensibility (for new types of data) by means of inheritance.…”