Management of geomedia content: Context-dependent data access

Accessing geomedia (i.e. geographic multimedia) documents is becoming a major application area where new information management strategies are needed. The concept of multidimensional data is an effective approach to reduce the complexity of structural access management. As XML becomes a key point both for data representation and transactions, it is necessary to investigate all improvements related to DBMS’s that pertain to these areas. The data used in our research is taken from the geomedia world, where the content is a mix of geographic and cultural multimedia information. We add multidimensional features into XML in order to be able to deal with, and take advantage of, various user properties, such as language. This technique enables us, for instance, to offer efficient multilingual support. Focusing on XML, this paper investigates multidimensional indexing methods and introduces a new operator to include these new models into the Phasme information engine prototype.