ABSTRACT
At a minimum, a multimedia database must contain the media itself, plus some level of metadata which describes the media. In early systems, this metadata was limited to simple fields containing basic attributes such as the media title, author, etc. and the user would select media using relational queries on the fields. Video on demand systems are one example of this. More recently, systems have been developed to analyze the content of the media to create rich streams of features for indexing and retrieval. For example, by including a transcription of the dialog (along with the temporal information) in the database, the advances that have been made in the field of text information retrieval can be applied to the multimedia information retrieval domain. Typically these systems support random access to the linear media using keyword searches [3] and in some cases, they support queries based on media content [5].
