Modeling multimedia objects for content-based retrieval

This paper reports the work-in-progress on the definition of an object-oriented data model tailored for multimedia applications within the HERMES project. The wide diffusion of multimedia applications that use CD quality audio, video, high quality images, etc. and the initial availability of multimedia databases lead to the need of finding suitable solutions for the retrieval and the manipulation of multimedia data. In this paper we present a multimedia data model that addresses the aspects related to data presentation, manipulation and content-based retrieval. The core of the model consists of three parts: the Multimedia Description Model, which provides a structural view of raw multimedia data; the Multimedia Presentation Model, whose main feature is the possibility of describing the temporal and spatial relationships among different media objects; the Multimedia Interpretation Model which allows to associate semantic interpretation with the multimedia objects stored in the database.