MQuery: A Visual Query Language for Multimedia, Timeline and Simulation Data

This paper describes a visual query language that can express questions over multimedia, timeline, and simulation data using a single set of related query constructs. A uniform model for multimedia types organizes image, sound, video, and long text data in a consistent manner, giving multimedia schemas and queries a degree of data independence even for these complex data types. Information that possesses an intrinsic temporal element can all be queried using a construct called a stream. Streams can be aggregated into parallel multistreams, thus providing a structure for querying and retrieving multiple sets of time-based information. The uni ed stream construct permits real-time measurements, numerical simulation data, and visualizations of that data to be aggregated and manipulated using the same set of operators.