A NEXT-GENERATION DATABASE SYSTEM FOR ADVANCED MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

New multimedia applications have emerged on top of information infrastructures, such as on-demand services, digital libraries and museums, online shopping, information Q & A, concurrent engineering, document management, and desktop program production, which require new databases. That is, next-generation database systems must enable users to efficiently and flexibly develop and execute such advanced multimedia applications. Moreover, in some applications, there is no existent data; in others, there are databases or files to be integrated. This requires both top-down and bottom-up database development. To this end, we focus on development of a database system which enables flexible and efficient acquisition, storage, access and retrieval, and distribution and presentation of large amounts of heterogeneous media data, In particular, we propose a multimedia data model as an integration of structural, temporal, spatial, and control functionality. That is, we take an approach based on an object-oriented database, which is more suitable for description of media structures and operations than a traditional relational database. And we extend the object-oriented approach by providing temporal and spatial operators, and control of distributing computing and QOS (quality of service). In this paper, we describe a multimedia data model and its efficient implementation.