Querying multimedia information systems using SQL

Relatively little work has been done on developing the mathematical foundations of multimedia technology. S. Marcus and V.S. Subrahmanian (1995; 1994) have taken some initial steps toward the development of a theoretical basis for multimedia information systems. They define a mathematical model of a media instance. A media instance may be thought of as "glue" residing on top of a specific physical media representation (such as video, audio, documents, etc.) Using this "glue", it is possible to define a general purpose logical query language to query multimedia data. This glue consists of a set of "states" and "features", together with relationships between states and/or features. A structured multimedia database system imposes a certain mathematical structure on the set of features/states. Using this notion of a structure, they are able to define indexing structures for processing queries, methods to relax queries when answers do not exist to those queries, as well as sound, complete and terminating procedures to answer such queries. Using the S. Marcus and V.S. Subrahmanian (1995; 1994) work on multimedia database integration systems, we show how their logical based query language can be redefined as an SQL based query language. As there are numerous commercial SQL database systems, a wide and diverse population of users may access the Marcus and Subrahmanian work using their SQL interface. Also, there has been a great deal of study of query optimization of SQL based languages.