An Architecture for a Multimedia Database Management System Supporting Content Search

Advanced applications frequently require the management of multimedia data like text, images, graphics, sound, etc. While it is practical for today's computers to store these types of data, managing them requires the search of them based on their contents. Database management systems should be extended to organize these new types of data and to enable content search. However, the complexity of the contents and their semantics makes content search of these data a very difficult problem. This paper proposes to have multimedia data accompanied by natural language descriptions that will be used for content search of these data. A parser is used to interpret the descriptions and to later match them semantically with queries. Implications and difficulties of such an approach are discussed.