Multimedia databases in perspective

Authors

Publication date 9 March 1999

Databases databases Multimedia multimedia non-standard data management Perspective

Collections of articles of miscellaneous specific interest (00B15) Proceedings, conferences, collections, etc. pertaining to computer science (68-06) Network design and communication in computer systems (68M10) Database theory (68P15)

Review text

This book provides a comprehensive survey of multimedia database research issues, together with the description of several 98 state of the art multimedia prototype systems of various nature. The book consists in many different, self-contained chapters, which can be read separately from one another. In particular, chapters are divided in four main groups. Group I focuses on investigating about the requirements for multimedia database: in Chapter 1, the concept of multimedia is defined, and the structure of the book is motivated and sketched. Chapter 2 gives an overview of emerging multimedia applications of various nature and purposes, such as a multimedia publication environment, a query by content image database, and virtual world application. Chapter 3 motivates why and how traditional database architectures should be restructured in order to deal with multimedia data, which are the new data types to be managed, and which are the new functionalities required by users. Group II summarizes some interesting multimedia client applications: Chapter 4 discusses virtual reality, giving an overview of virtual world's applications requirements in terms of hardware and software, and some reference to virtual world databases issues. In Chapter 5 some issues regarding information retrieval and arising when the multimedia data to be retrieved are distributed (e.g. within the WWW) are considered. Group III embeds server application-related chapters: Chapter 6 focuses the attention on the SQL3 draft standard exposing limits and enhancements, w.r.t. general purpose and multimedia needs, of this query language. Chapter 7 describes SGML features, and then introduces the, SGML defined, HyTime language, discussing its multimedia features. In Chapter 8, the challenging issue of content based querying on multimedia data is dealt with. Approaches toward retrieval of text, audio, images and video are described. Problems of similar nature are described in Chapter 9, where query optimisation methods are overviewed, and the MULTOS system used as the main example. Chapter 10 extends query processing issues, focusing the attention on multimedia indexing techniques. A generalization of the problem is illustrated, and then many data-dependent solutions are given. Group IV considers systems and issues regarding the environments which should support multimedia systems, such as operating systems (Chapter 11), and communication technologies (Chapter 12). Finally, Chapter 13 expresses some considerations about critical success factors for multimedia. Both technical, social and economic factors are considered. The overall quality of the book is good, but the work suffer from some lack of coordination between each chapter, although we noticed the effort paid to organize the contents in a linear structure. In fact, several concepts are introduced several times in different chapters and, in general, the content of many of them overlaps, which may be not be pleasant for a reader deciding to go through the whole book. The lack of a large number of practical examples and of introductory definitions makes the book not so well-suited for non-specialized reader. Many parts of the book are plenty of useful references to the literature, and can constitute a practical guide to the researcher which approaches to the field. Due to the book's age, some new solution, such as XML-based systems, are not dealt with.

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