ABSTRACT
A noticeable characteristic of the current information systems is the ubiquitous use of multimedia data, such as image, audio, video, time series and hypertext. The processing power demanded by the increasing volume of information generated by business and scientific applications has motivated researchers of the data base, artificial intelligence, statistics and visualization fields, who have been working closely to build tools that allow to understand and to efficiently manipulate this kind of data. Besides the multimedia data being complex, they are voluminous as well. Thus, to deal with the multimedia data embedded in the current systems, much more powerful and elaborate apparatuses are required as compared to the needs of the simple data handled by the old systems.
