Query taxonomy of multimedia databases

There have been tremendous technological advances in the areas of processors, mass storage devices, gigabit networks, and information capturing instruments over the past several years. These advances have made it feasible to access digital libraries and multimedia databases that contain large quantities of high-quality video, images, audio, and textural content by a much broader community through the Internet. The sheer volume of multimedia content, unlike Web pages which are almost exclusively indexed by text, prevents any single company or party from having the full knowledge of all the content available. Given the fact that multiple content repositories are emerging and it is safe to predict no two will be the same in terms of the ways analysis, query and retrieval being made, it is not hard to foresee challenges ahead in interoperability in a heterogeneous environment.