UMQL: A Unified Multimedia Query Language

We propose a unified multimedia query language called UMQL, based on a semi-structured data model. In contrast to previous multimedia query languages that are either designed only for one particular medium or not powerful enough on multimedia query ability, UMQL is a general and powerful multimedia language which can support effectively queries based on content, structure, spatial relationships and temporal relationships of multimedia data, and finally has been shown to be very expressive and quite suitable for multimedia information retrieval.