Query taxonomy of multimedia databases

Abstract

There have been tremendous technological advances in the areas of processors, mass storage devices, gigabit networks, and information capturing instruments over the past several years. These advances have made it feasible to access digital libraries and multimedia databases that contain large quantities of high-quality video, images, audio, and textual content by a much broader community through the Internet. The sheer volume of multimedia content, unlike Web pages which are almost exclusively indexed by text, prevents any single company or party from having the full knowledge of all the content available. Given the fact that multiple content repositories are emerging and it is safe to predict no two will be the same in terms of the ways analysis, query and retrieval being made, it is not hard to foresee challenges ahead in interoperability in a heterogeneous environment. In this paper, we attempt to address a fundamental issue in interoperability - query-specification taxonomy. We propose to use a taxonomy of progressively enhanced query capability to enable interoperability among heterogeneous multimedia databases. Such taxonomy establishes the vocabularies for a self-describing search engine. By using the proposed taxonomy, any search engine will be able to understand the capability of any other search engines with a single exchange of request/response. Capability exchange sets the footstone of subsequent communications. Our proposed taxonomy consists of four dimensions - data modality, schema exposure, query mode, and matching fuzziness. We explain and discuss levels in each dimension. We reviewed ten multimedia databases and commented on their query capabilities based on this taxonomy. We feet a concensus on query taxonomy is in urgent need in the research community for further advance in heterogeneous multimedia repositories.