ABSTRACT
Users of future distributed Multimedia Database Management Systems (MMDBMSs) will be heavily mobile and require ubiquitous access to, and satisfactory presentation of, multimedia data, regardless of the actual connectivity and the specific presentation terminal they are currently using. Moreover, users will expect to find information and multimedia content faster and more easily (e.g., query by semantics), and will interact with the content much more intensively than they do today. Finally, users will expect to make avail of more sophisticated multimedia services, such as location-aware services, multimedia billing services, or advanced observation services, that go beyond the simple database searches (e.g., query by color similarity) of today.
