Multimedia database

A Multimedia database (MMDB) is a collection of related for multimedia data. The multimedia data include one or more primary media data types such as text, images, graphic objects (including drawings, sketches and illustrations) animation sequences, audio and video.

A Multimedia Database Management System (MMDBMS) is a framework that manages different types of data potentially represented in a wide diversity of formats on a wide array of media sources. It provides support for multimedia data types, and facilitate for creation, storage, access, query and control of a multimedia database.

A Multimedia Database (MMDB) hosts one or more multimedia data types (i.e. text, images, graphic objects, audio, video, animation sequences). These data types are broadly categorized into three classes:

Additionally, a Multimedia Database (MMDB) needs to manage additional information pertaining to the actual multimedia data. The information is about the following:

The last three types are called metadata as they describe several different aspects of the media data. The media keyword data and media feature data are used as indices for searching purpose. The media format data is used to present the retrieved information.

Like the traditional databases, Multimedia databases should address the following requirements:

Multimedia databases should have the ability to uniformly query data (media data, textual data) represented in different formats and have the ability to simultaneously query different media sources and conduct classical database operations across them. (Query support)

They should have the ability to retrieve media objects from a local storage device in a good manner. (Storage support)