Querying multimedia presentations

We examine the querying requirements of large libraries of multimedia presentations. Given these requirements, we examine work on querying temporal and sequence data, and identify the similarities and dissimilarities between presentations and these other forms of data. From this analysis, we propose an integrated composition and query capability to permit the reuse of multimedia objects, presentations and presentation segments. The query facility permits content and attribute based queries along with queries over temporal synchronization characteristics. The main contributions of our work are: it addresses both determinant and indeterminant intervals; it permits querying over presentation libraries with heterogeneous structure; it builds on work from temporal and sequence database to address the unique semantics of presentations.