Spatio-Temporal Multimedia Presentations as Database Objects

In this paper, we present a database model and a prototype system which provide a general format for multimedia presentations with spatio-temporal aspects. This representation is independent of any description language and media type and can be used to interpret and to integrate heterogeneous multimedia data coming from different distributed sources. We put a special emphasis on spatial aspects and we provide both qualitative and quantitative relations to compose and query multimedia presentations. The originality of our approach is that presentations can be specified, stored as database objects, queried and executed.