MediaView: A Semantic View Mechanism for Multimedia Modeling

The semantics of multimedia data, which features context-dependency and media-independency, is of vital importance to multimedia applications but inadequately supported by the state-of-the-art database technology. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing MediaView as an extended object-oriented view mechanism to bridge the “semantic gap” between conventional databases and semantics-intensive multimedia applications. This mechanism captures the dynamic semantics of multimedia using a modeling construct named media view, which formulates a customized context where heterogeneous media objects with similar/related semantics are characterized by additional properties and user-defined semantic relationships. View operators are proposed for the manipulation and derivation of media views. The feasibility of MediaView is validated by an experimental implementation, and its usefulness and elegancy is demonstrated by its application in a multimodal information retrieval system.