There are essential differences between multimedia databases (which may contain complicated objects, such as images), and traditional databases. These differences lead to interesting new issues, and in particular cause us to consider new types of queries. For example, in a multimedia database it is reasonable and natural to ask for images that are somehow "similar to" some fixed image. Furthermore, there are different ways of obtaining and accessing information in a multimedia database than information in a traditional database. For example, in a multimedia database, it might be reasonable to have a query that asks for, say, the top 10 images that are similar to a fixed image. This is in contrast to a relational database, where the answer to a query is simply a set. (Of course, in a relational database, the result to a query may be sorted in some way for convenience in presentation, such as sorting department members by salary, but logically speaking, the result is still simply a set, ...

Document properties are a compelling infrastructure on which to develop document management applications. A property-based approach avoids many of the problems of traditional hierarchical storage mechanisms, reflects document organizations meaningful to user tasks, provides a means to integrate the perspectives of multiple individuals and groups, and does this all within a uniform interaction framework. Document properties can reflect not only categorizations of documents and document use, but also expressions of desired system activity, such as sharing criteria, replication management and versioning. Augmenting property-based document management systems with active properties that carry executable code enables the provision of document-based services on a property infrastructure. The combination of document properties as a uniform mechanism for document management, and active properties as a way of delivering document services, represents a new paradigm for document management infras...

This paper describes the design and implementation of PESTO (Portable Explorer of STructured Objects), a user interface that supports browsing and querying of object databases. PESTO allows users to navigate the relationships that exist among objects. In addition, users can formulate complex object queries through an integrated query paradigm ("query-in-place") that presents querying as a natural extension of browsing. PESTO is designed to be portable to any object database system that supports a high-level query language; in addition, PESTO is extensible, providing hooks for specialized predicate formation and object display tools for new data types (e.g., images or text). 1 Introduction The Garlic project at the IBM Almaden Research Center [Care95] is developing a system and associated tools for managing large quantities of heterogeneous multimedia information. The goal of Garlic is to permit both traditional and multimedia data residing in a variety of existing data repositories ...

The MIX mediator systems incorporates a novel framework for navigation-driven evaluation of virtual mediated views. Its architecture allows the on-demand computation of views and query results as the user navigates them. The evaluation scheme minimizes superfluous source access through the use of lazy mediators that translate incoming client navigations on virtual XML views into navigations on lower level mediators or wrapped sources. The proposed demand-driven approach is inevitable for handling up-to-date mediated views of large Web sources or query results. The non-materialization of the query answer is transparent to the client application since clients can navigate the query answer using a subset of the standard DOM API for XML documents. We elaborate on query evaluation in such a framework and show how algebraic plans can be implemented as trees of lazy mediators. Finally, we present a new buffering technique that can mediate between the fine granularity of DOM navigations and the coarse granularity of real world sources. This drastically reduces communication overhead and also simplifies wrapper development. An implementation of the system is available on the Web.

Applications like multimedia databases or enterprisewide information management systems have to meet the challenge of efficiently retrieving best matching objects from vast collections of data. We present a new algorithm Stream-Combine for processing multi-feature queries on heterogeneous data sources. Stream-Combine is selfadapting to different data distributions and to the specific kind of the combining function. Furthermore we present a new retrieval strategy that will essentially speed up the output of relevant objects.

eamlessly between querying and browsing activities, using queries to identify interesting subsets of the database, browsing the subset, querying the content of a setvalued attribute of a particularly interesting object in the subset, and so on. The Demo In our demo, Garlic integrates data from three repositories: a DB2 Client/Server database, an ObjectStore object-oriented database from Object Design, Inc., and a QBIC repository [4] that provides query by image content. Queries may involve one or more repositories. When the query spans multiple repositories, Garlic manages the processing of the query across the different repositories and fills in for those repositories that have limited query processing power. For example, a multimedia query may involve images as well as relational parametric data that describe the images. Garlic will dispatch the relational predicates to the DB2 repository, the image predicates to the QBIC repository, and integrate their responses to

Multimedia information retrieval is a challenging problem because multimedia information is not inherently structured. Jabber is an experimental system that attempts to bring some structure to this task. Jabber allows users to retrieve records of videoconferences based upon the concepts discussed. In this paper we introduce ConceptFinder, a sub-system within Jabber, and show how it is able to process the spoken text of a meeting into meeting topics. ConceptFinder can make subtle distinctions among different senses of the same words, and is able to summarize a set of related words, giving a name to each topic. Users can then use this name to query or browse the stored multimedia, through Jabber's user interface. By presenting information that closely matches a user's expectations, the challenge of multimedia retrieval is rendered more tractable. Keywords Multimedia indexing, information retrieval and browsing, concept clustering INTRODUCTION Multimedia holds tremendous appeal becau...

A "scoring rule" is an assignment of a value to every tuple (of varying sizes). This paper is concerned with the issue of how to modify a scoring rule to apply to the case where weights are assigned to the importance of each argument. We give an explicit formula for incorporating weights that can be applied no matter what the underlying scoring rule is. The formula is surprisingly simple, in that it involves far fewer terms than one might have guessed. It has three further desirable properties. The first desirable property is that when all of the weights are equal, then the result is obtained by simply using the underlying scoring rule. Intuitively, this says that when all of the weights are equal, then this is the same as considering the unweighted case. The second desirable property is that if a particular argument has zero weight, then that argument can be dropped without affecting the value of the result. The third desirable property is that the value of the result is a continuous ...

Nowadays scientific data is inevitably digital and stored in a wide variety of formats in heterogeneous systems. Scientists need to access an integrated view of remote or local heterogeneous data sources with advanced data accessing, analyzing, and visualization tools. Building a digital library for scientific data requires accessing and manipulating data extracted from flat files or databases, documents retrieved from the Web as well as data generated by software. We present an approach to wrapping web data sources, databases, flat files, or data generated by tools through a database view mechanism. Generally, a wrapper has two tasks: it first sends a query to the source to retrieve data and, second builds the expected output with respect to the virtual structure. Our wrappers are composed of a retrieval component based on an intermediate object view mechanism called search views mapping the source capabilities to attributes, and an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) engine, respectively, to perform these two tasks. The originality of the approach consists of: 1) a generic view mechanism to access seamlessly data sources with limited capabilities and 2) the ability to wrap data sources as well as the useful specific tools they may provide. Our approach has been developed and demonstrated as part of the multidatabase system supporting queries via uniform object protocol model (OPM) interfaces.

Multimedia databases have attracted academic and industrial interest, and systems such as QBIC (Content Based Image Retrieval system from IBM) have been released. Such systems are essential to effectively and efficiently use the existing large collections of image data in the modern computing environment. The aim of such systems is to enable retrieval of images based on their contents. This problem has brought together the (decades old) database and image processing communities. As part of our research in this area, we are building a prototype CBIR system called CHITRA. This uses a four level data model, and we have defined a Fuzzy Object Query Language(FOQL) for this system. This system enables retrieval based on high level concepts, such as "retrieve images of MOUNTAINS", "retrieve images of MOUNTAINS and SUNSET". A problem faced in this system is processing of complex queries such as "retrieve all images that have similar color histogram AND similar texture to the given example imag...