A Multimedia database (MMDB) is a collection of related for

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

. The

data include one or more primary media data types such as text,

image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensio ...

s, graphic

objects Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ai ...

(including

drawing Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayo ...

s, sketches and

illustration An illustration is a decoration, interpretation or visual explanation of a text, concept or process, designed for integration in print and digital published media, such as posters, flyers, magazines, books, teaching materials, animations, video ...

animation Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...

sequences,

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

and

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) sy ...

. A Multimedia Database Management System (MMDBMS) is a

framework A framework is a generic term commonly referring to an essential supporting structure which other things are built on top of. Framework may refer to: Computing * Application framework, used to implement the structure of an application for an op ...

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.

Contents of MMDB

A Multimedia Database (MMDB) hosts one or more

data types (i.e. text, images, graphic objects, audio, video, animation sequences). These data types are broadly categorized into ''three classes'': * Static media (time-independent:

and graphic object). * Dynamic media (time-dependent:

and

). * Dimensional media(3D game and

computer aided drafting Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

programs).

Comparison of multimedia data types

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

format Format may refer to: Printing and visual media * Text formatting, the typesetting of text elements * Paper formats, or paper size standards * Newspaper format, the size of the paper page Computing * File format, particular way that informatio ...

of the media data after it goes through the acquisition, processing, and encoding phases. * Media keyword data: the keyword descriptions, usually relating to the generation of the media data. * Media feature data: content dependent data such as contain information about the distribution of colours, the kinds of textures and the different shapes present in an image. The last three types are called

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

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.

Requirements of Multimedia databases

Like the traditional

databases In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

, Multimedia databases should address the following requirements: * Integration **Data items do not need to be duplicated for different programs invocations *Data independence **Separate the database and the management from the application programs *Concurrency control **Allows concurrent transactions *Persistence **Data objects can be saved and re-used by different transactions and program invocations *Privacy **Access and authorization control *Integrity control **Ensures

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

consistency between transactions *Recovery **Failures of transactions should not affect the persistent data storage *Query support **Allows easy querying of multimedia data Multimedia databases should have the ability to uniformly query data (media data,

textual data In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical a ...

) represented in different formats and have the ability to simultaneously query different media sources and conduct classical

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)'' They should have the ability to take the response generated by a query and develop a presentation of that response in terms of

audio-visual Audiovisual (AV) is electronic media possessing both a sound and a visual component, such as slide-tape presentations, films, television programs, corporate conferencing, church services, and live theater productions. Audiovisual service pro ...

media and have the ability to deliver this presentation. ''(Presentation and delivery support)''

Issues and challenges

* Multimedia data consists of a variety of media formats or file representations including

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word process ...

, BMP, PPT,

IVUE The IVUE file format is an image format used by Live Picture, a discontinued image application. It chunks an images into tiles and stores multiple quarter-downscaled versions of one image. It is supported by Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop ...

, FPX,

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

, MPEG,

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

, MID, WAV, DOC, GIF, EPS, PNG, etc. Because of restrictions on the conversion from one

to the other, the use of the data in a specific

has been limited as well. Usually, the data size of multimedia is large such as video; therefore, multimedia data often require a large storage. *Multimedia database consume a lot of processing time, as well as bandwidth. *Some multimedia data types such as video, audio, and animation sequences have temporal requirements that have implications on their storage, manipulation and presentation, but

and

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, ...

data have special constraints in terms of their content.

Application areas

Examples of multimedia database application areas: * Digital Libraries * News-on-Demand * Video-on-Demand * Music database * Geographic Information Systems (GIS) * Telemedicine

References