Design and implementation of a multimedia DBMS : retrieval management

Abstract

Current conventional Database Management Systems (DBMS) manage only alphanumeric data. However, data to be stored in the future is expected to include some multimedia form, such as images, graphics, sounds or signals. The structure and the semantics of the media data and the operations on that data are complex. It is not clear what requirements are needed in a DBMS to manage this kind of data. It is also not clear what is needed in the data model to support this kind of data; nor what the user interface should be for such a system. The goal of the Multimedia Database Management System project in the computer science department of the Naval Post Graduate School is to build into a Database Management System (DBMS) the capability to manage multimedia data, as well as the formatted data, and define operations on multimedia data. This thesis, focusing only on the media data of image and sound, first describes the operations of such a system, then discusses the general design of it, and finally outline the detailed design and implementation of the retrieval operation.