A multimedia query specification language

Typically, multimedia applications involve thousands of hours of video, images, audio, text and graphics that need to be stored, retrieved and manipulated in a large multimedia database. There is therefore an important need for novel techniques and systems which provide an efficient retrieval facility of the voluminous information stored in the multimedia database. Such facility will consist of a query language, a data structure, and a content searching algorithm. We propose a multimedia query specification language that can be used to describe the multimedia content portion to be retrieved from the database. Such a content portion is termed a multimedia segment which may contain information on the media as well as the temporal and spatial relationships that may exist between these media