Research on Multimedia Database Systems at GMD-IPSI

The Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) is one of the eight institutes of the GMD German National Research Center for Information Technology. GMD is owned by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF) and the Federal states Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. IPSI's mission is the development and evaluation of concepts, foundations, and system prototypes for the next generation of distributed and cooperative multimedia application scenarios. Research on multimedia database management systems (MM-DBMSs) at IPSI started at the end of the 80's [3]. In 1992, the department Active Media Object Stores (AMOS) was founded to foster developments in this research area [7]. At the 1993 SIGMOD Conference an early prototype of a video server was demonstrated which allowed for transparent access to analog as well as (short) digital video clips [9]. In a rst application project granted by the German Telekom subsidiary DeTeBerkom, Berlin, a multimedia archiving teleservice was developed and implemented in close cooperation with the European Networking Center of IBM, Heidelberg [8]. At present, about ten scientists and several students are working in the AMOS department. Concepts are implemented in the AMOS MM-DBMS prototype and are elaborated by means of international research projects as well as industrial projects in the application domains of cooperative authoring and engineering systems, multimedia information systems, digital libraries, and telecommunication services. Currently, cooperation projects are carried out on the following topics: