Internet multimedia databases

The advent of the Internet has seen a rapid rise of information for remote access. A large proportion of the information is in the form of databases to coherently store information with certain characteristics. The Internet adds the dimension of distributed system architecture upon which Internet multimedia databases are built. It also exhibits a synergy with the potential to provide a range of applications and tools. The hypertext model is commonly used to express multimedia document structures due to its flexibility and extensibility. Standards are being developed for representing multimedia databases (MPEG-7) and integrating diverse applications within distributed heterogeneous environments (CORBA). This paper is a brief introduction to multimedia databases in the context of the World Wide Web and examines the effects of the Internet on multimedia databases-enriched databases, highlights some of the problems facing current databases, such as missing authoring features and browsing issue and the research currently undertaken to solve some of these problems such as content-based image retrieval in multimedia databases.