Representing and reasoning with temporal constraints in multimedia presentations

With the growing use of computers to create technical, business and personal presentations, there has been a huge increase in the number of multimedia presentation tools out in the market. Thus, over the coming years, there will be a growing need to build the ability to query rapidly databases consisting of interactive multimedia presentations. The MPA algebra proposed by Adali et al. provides a specification of how primitive algebraic operations on interactive multimedia presentations can be implemented. In this paper we define a temporal extension of MPA dealing with temporal constraints in the representation and in the queries. In particular, we point out the different types of (explicit and implicit) temporal constraints within a multimedia presentation and define a suitable framework in which the different types of constraints can be represented and queries (regarding also the temporal aspects) can be answered efficiently.