Four Promising Multimedia Databases and Their Embodiments

Multimedia database systems have become more and more important as the tool to extract and generate additional values from multimedia ‘Contents’. In this paper, four multimedia database systems are proposed from the view point of promising contents sources; the Network multimedia databases, the Stream MM database systems, the Library MM database systems, and the Real world MM database systems. Important problems to be solved, i.e., ‘what to do’, are also discussed for each databases. Three concrete multimedia systems by authors' research group, are then introduced and discussed as the embodiments of these multimedia systems; (1) the open Global Image Retrieval and Linking System, GIRLS, for mediation WWW data pace as the network MM database systems, (2) the flexible multimedia database platform GOLS, and (3) the higher level authoring system for the Stream MM environments.