CONTENT: A practical, scalable, high-performance multimedia database

This paper describes Content, a practical, scalable, and high performance text-indexed multimedia database system. The novelty of Content is in its approach of integrating high-volume storage, fast searching and browsing, easy multimedia acquisition, effective updates, scalability, extendibility, and an API based on HTTP. Content is also a low-cost solution for large multimedia databases that is available today. Standard Web-based browsers such as Netscape can query the Content server. The API is flexible so that different and unique Content clients on multiple platforms can be built to access multiple Content servers. The Content architecture permits any multimedia type to be stored. Text descriptions are used as indices for images and videos. Content includes an easy-to-use Windows-based acquisition station for acquiring images and video. Currently, Content is being used in a real library setting and contains more than 25,000 multimedia objects that span two different collections of valuable historical photographs. In terms of performance, Content can access a single image in a database of over one million images in less than a second.