Metadata Transformation and Management with Oracle interMedia

The management of multimedia data in object-relational database systems presents a challenging problem for extracting, processing, and managing associated metadata. This information is usually embedded within the media source using proprietary formats, thus not easily accessible in a uniform fashion. This poses a need for a series of structural transformations to ensure that the metadata gathering process produces a unified representation across a multitude of media sources. The ultimate goal of these transformations is to consolidate management efforts for diverse sources of media. This paper presents the Oracle MediaAnnotator, an extensible architecture developed to be used with Oracle8i interMedia. The MediaAnnotator supports automatic extraction and transformation of metadata into logical annotations. This approach allows for the creation of unified metadata repositories, which can then be used for indexing and searching. The extensible nature of this architecture makes it applicable to any multimedia domain. The MediaAnnotator leverages Oracle8i interMedia to tie together the multimedia data and its logical annotations; this offers greater manageability of media archives and opens the possibility for new applications which integrate multimedia content with other user data.