A declarative language for similarity queries

In recent years, there has been much work on the retrieval of information from multimedia repositories. In particular, researchers have shown a great deal of interest in merging the results returned by multiple multimedia repositories into a single result. This task is challenging due to the heterogeneities among such systems, e.g. differences in the indexing methods and similarity functions employed by individual systems. In this paper, we define a declarative language for expressing queries that combine results from multiple similarity computations. We demonstrate the unique characteristics of this language and show how it provides for interesting and novel similarity queries. Numerous examples are given throughout.