SM3+: An XML database solution for the management of MPEG-7 descriptions

MPEG-7 is a promising standard for the description of multimedia content. A lot of applications based on MPEG-7 media descriptions have been set up. Therefore, an efficient storage solution for large amounts of MPEC-7 descriptions are certainly desirable. MPEG-7 documents are also data-centric XML documents. Due to many advantages, the relational DBMS is the best choice for storing such XML documents. However, the existing RDBMS-based XML storage solutions can not reach all the critical requirements for MPEG-7 descriptions management. In this paper, we analyse the problems when using existing RDBMS-based XML storage approaches to store MPEG-7 documents and then present a new storage approach, called SM3+ that integrates the advantages of existing XML storage models and avoid the main drawbacks from them. Its features can reach the most critical requirements for MPEG-7 documents storage and management. Performance studies are conducted and the experimental results are encouraging.