MediaView:: A semantic view mechanism for multimedia modeling

The semantics of multimedia data, which features context-dependency and media-independency, is of vital importance to multimedia applications but inadequately supported by the state-of-the-art database technology. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing MediaView as an extended object-oriented view mechanism to bridge the "semantic gap" between conventional databases and semantics-intensive multimedia applications. This mechanism captures the dynamic semantics of multimedia using a modeling construct named media view, which formulates a customized context where heterogeneous media objects with similar/related semantics are characterized by additional properties and user-defined semantic relationships. View operators are proposed for the manipulation and derivation of media views. The usefulness and elegancy of MediaView are demonstrated by its application in a multi-modal information retrieval system.