Devising a Semantic Model for Multimedia Databases: Rationale, Facilities, and Applications

When people realized that relational databases fall short in supporting advanced applications including multimedia data management due to the limited modeling power of the relational data model, researchers went ahead with devising semantic, object-oriented data models in the 80´s (until early 90´s). While the later commercial development of database systems has led to the so-called object- relational databases since late 90´s, such a marriage of the two does not actually solve the problems encountered by multimedia data management. In this paper, we present a new semantic multimedia database model based on an extension to the traditional ANSI/SPARC three level architecture, attempting to cater for the unique requirements of multimedia data management. Various facilities of this semantic multimedia database model are described and discussed. A number of applications have been developed based on this new model, and in this paper we describe some of these including recipe modeling and graph mining for retrieval.