An extended object-oriented approach to a multimedia database system for networked applications

New multimedia applications, such as digital libraries, require next-generation database systems enabling users to efficiently and flexibly develop and execute such applications. To this end, we focus on the development of a database system which enables flexible and efficient acquisition, storage, access and retrieval, and distribution and presentation of large amounts of heterogeneous media data. In this paper, we propose a multimedia database system for networked multimedia applications, based on an OODB model extended with agents. We describe an early prototype system to verify the proposed approach. This prototype supports multimedia scripts, keyword-based and content-based view retrieval with QOS control, self-organizing map-based clustering and WWW integration.