A Friendly and Intelligent Approach to Data Retrieval in a Multimedia DBMS

Abstract

Manipulation of multimedia data is not straightforward as in conventional database. One main problem is the retrieval of multimedia data from the database with the need to match the contents of multimedia data to a user query. In order to achieve a content based retrieval in our approach, we use natural language captions which allow the user to describe the contents of multimedia data. In a similar manner, users will specify their queries on multimedia data contents in natural language form. A problem is that different or even the same user describe the same thing differently at different times which results in the descriptions of the contents of multimedia data to rarely exactly match the descriptions of the user queries. Hence, partial or approximate match between descriptions of multimedia data and user queries is generally required during multimedia data retrieval. We propose an intelligent approach to approximate match by integrating both object-oriented and natural language understanding techniques. In order to make the query specification process easier we also develop a graphical user interface supporting incremental query specification and a natural way of expressing joins. The Multimedia Database Management System (MDBMS) described in this paper incorporates the capabilities as mentioned above