A multimedia query user interface

The introduction of the new media types, such as video, lead to an overwhelming need to novel techniques and systems that provide an efficient retrieval facility of the voluminous information stored in multimedia databases. Perhaps the most obvious problem in these systems is how to specify queries on wanted multimedia document portions. Previously, we proposed a multimedia query language that describes the multimedia content portion to be retrieved based on the information of the media it contains as well as the temporal and spatial relationships between these media. In this paper, we introduce a visual user interface that could be developed on top of this query language. Our main goal is to define an interface that is easy to understand by users and accomplishes visual interaction in a user-friendly manner