DESIGN OF A MULTIMEDIA OBJECT-ORIENTED DBMS

The emerging multimedia information (such as video, image, voice, grap hics) services have imposed many new requirements and research conside rations on the design of database management systems (DBMSs). Conventi onally, a multimedia DBMS is designed by developing a multimedia prese ntation layer on top of a pre-existing object-oriented DBMS (which can be truly object-oriented or relational-based), such that the core of the DBMS was developed earlier independent of the design of the multim edia presentation layer. Due to the fact that multimedia capabilities are not actually embedded in the DBMSs, such systems tend to provide o nly a rather limited set of functionalities in multimedia and are not satisfactory in supporting multimedia applications. This paper describ es some key features of a multimedia object-oriented DBMS that is curr ently being developed. In this system the DBMS is carefully redesigned to provide special multimedia capabilities, such that the mismatch be tween the DBMS and the multimedia application layer can be eliminated. In particular, this paper will focus on unique multimedia capabilitie s including multimedia object modeling, video data management, and dis tributed collaboration.