A presentation scheduling scheme for multimedia databases

An essential function of the multimedia DBMS is to present objects of the query result according to their temporal-spatial relations. These relations can be specified within the database schema on the class level and used for each object presentation. In the case of partial extraction, however, the retrieved objects may not belong to an existing class, but to a newly created class which does not have temporal-spatial relations. For the presentation of such objects, most systems make users perform authoring of the temporal-spatial relations of the objects. The paper proposes a scheme which generates presentation schedules for the query result whether the objects of the query result belong to existing classes or not. In this scheme, a TS-tree (temporal/spatial tree) is defined as the temporal-spatial structure of a class and the presentation schedules for objects of the class are generated from the tree. The TS-tree for objects which belong to a newly created class can be automatically generated from existing TS-trees. Consequently users are quite relieved from authoring efforts.