Persistent Data Management for Visual Applications

A visual application is an application that manipulates visual data as part of its processing. Visual applications need to represent, manipulate, store, and retrieve both raw and processed visual data. Existing relational and object-oriented database systems fail to offer satisfactory visual data management support because they lack the kinds of representations, storage structures, indices, access methods, and query mechanisms needed for visual data. We argue that extensible visual object stores offer feasible and effective means to address the data management needs of visual applications. ISR4 is such a visual object store under development at the University of Massachusetts for the management of persistent visual information.