The Handbook of Multimedia Information Management - Hardcover

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A student is searching a database for information on Berlin. She issues a command to narrow her search to the Berlin Wall. She finds an image containing Gorbachev in front of the wall, which is linked to files on this event, other images of the surrounding architecture, video files on the wall's history, and audio clips from residents in the area.

Sitting at a workstation, a neurosurgeon accesses the digitized tomography of her patient's brain, compares it to reference models, locates the tumor, and with a few spatial queries, plans the trajectory that the surgical instruments will follow to remove the tumor.

These are just a few of the possibilities of the Multimedia Database.

Traditionally, databases have been designed to handle quantifiable data―numbers, fields, words, etc.―things that can be easily identified, sorted, classified, and filed. Recent advances in data storage technology and the explosion of the world of multimedia require a new kind of database, one that can handle audio, video, CAD, hypermedia, images, and animation. But how do you identify what is contained in a video clip? How do you tie the search tools of the database into an audio excerpt? What if there are several versions or ones in different languages? What parameters do you apply when sorting graphic images? How do you store and retrieve this massive amount of information quickly and easily?

In The Handbook of Multimedia Information Management, a team of experts from all over the world tackles these and other questions.

• What sort of data model is needed for audio, video, music, animation, and other time-based data?
• How do you represent today's hyperlinked documents?
• How do you link the object's content to the database's systems for indexing and retrieval?
• How do you optimize the retrieval system to handle the huge amount of multimedia data?
• What kind of visual interfaces can be created to access the files?
• How can a single database handle the disparate sorts of multimedia data? How can you coordinate the various types to synchronize them back into a coherent unit?
• What advances in image, video, and audio compression and in server architectures have made multimedia databases possible?

For database designers, developers, and analysts or for anyone looking to catalog their exploding multimedia holdings, this book is required reading.