Design of a Spatio-Temporal Query Engine for Multimedia Presentations

Abstract

As amounts of publicly available multimedia data is growing, the need to query this data efficiently becomes significant. This paper proposes a spatio-temporal query engine which responds to queries that are based on specific characteristics of multimedia layouts. This query engine would facilitate interactive usage of multimedia layouts both in the spatial and temporal domain. The system accepts queries in the form of simple English like statements, eliminating the need to use any query language. In timeline based paradigm the layout is represented using temporal synchronization points and can be effectively used for non-iterative presentations. In this system graph based paradigm uses dynamic Petri nets, which are best suitable for iterative and interactive presentations. Query processor is the decision maker that decides whether to retrieve the data from the timeline based or graph based database. In the proposed system efficient algorithms have been designed and used to perform data retrieval effectively.