A System for Multimedia Information Management and Retrieval

The integrated management of multimedia information such as images, graphics, video, audio, and text, is of great interest in a lot of application fields. The major challenges in this non-trivial task are due to structural, syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of distributed multimedia data repositories. In this paper we present the design of a system, IDEM, based on an object-oriented data model and a wrapper/mediator architecture, which integrates data from heterogeneous multimedia repositories in a single, unified database view, in order to build a multimedia information system capable of integrating data that resides in different data base systems as well as in a variety of non-database data servers.