In this paper, we discuss important issues in designing and implementing a multimedia database system. First, we describe features used to model the content of image, video and music data. Based on the object model, we propose a multimedia framework and an object-level spatial/temporal model to represent the spatial/temporal relationships between media objects. Three new types of aggregation relationships composed of composition, temporal, and spatial relationships are considered in the framework. To support content-based retrieval, we propose a multimedia query language and two kinds of query interfaces for users to specify content-based queries. Finally, two kinds of multimedia query processing techniques are addressed.

Keywords: video/music/multimedia database, index, spatial/temporal model, content-based retrieval

Received May 16, 1996; revised June 10, 1997.
Communicated by Jan-Ming Ho.
^*This work was partially supported by the Republic of China, National Science Council under Contract No. NSC-86-2213-E-007-017.