DEMOM- A Media Object Model Incorporating Natural Language Descriptions for Retrieval Support

Abstract

The DEMOM (Description based Media Object data Model) media object data model aims at providing a uniform framework for managing different types of media data, i.e., images, text, sound or graphics. According to DEMOM media objects are defined as a class hierarchy of objects, i.e., images, text, sound, and graphics being subtypes of the general type media object. Representation specific objects are regarded as subordinate types of the corresponding subtype, e.g. a SUN raster image in pixrect format is an instance of the subtype pixrect which is in turn a subtype of image. Using images as an example we discuss the media object hierarchy, the corresponding access operations and implementation issues. Content oriented search of media data on the basis of predicate calculus is considered as an essential part of DEMOM and hence discussed as well