Web-based multimedia databases: prospects and challenges

Development of Web-based multimedia applications is expected to hold central importance for engineering and technological progress during the rest of this decade. It is already opening up new research frontiers in a number of areas such as multimedia data modeling and indexing, data mining, multimedia document management, semantic Web, pervasive computing, distributed sensor networks, computer security, real-time operating systems, human-computer interaction, and storage technology etc. As a result of concerted effort in these areas, many Web-accessible multimedia applications involving different media types, e.g., video, audio, text, images, animation and graphics, are rapidly emerging Examples of such applications abound in the domains of health care, education, entertainment, manufacturing, e-commerce, digital libraries as well as military and critical national infrastructures. The premise is that the integration of Web and multimedia technologies can provide cost effective solutions for management and dissemination of information, which is a primary tool for increasing economic efficiency. Development of Web-based multimedia applications needs a broad range of technological solutions that deal with organizing, storing, and delivering multimedia information in an integrated, secure and timely manner with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). Multimedia database management, when viewed in conjunction with integration of contents from independent Web-based data sources, present formidable research and development challenges. Key challenges include: • content analysis and indexing of distributed multimedia data and documents • semantic modeling and knowledge-based representation of multimedia data • transformation and organization of multimedia data semantics as a part of Semantic Web • security, privacy and QoS related issues concerning Web-based multimedia database applications • emerging Web standards and their role in managing distributed multimedia databases In this talk, we elaborate on these challenges and describe several solutions and tools that have been developed for Web-based multimedia database systems. Acknowledgement: This research was in part supported by the National Science Foundation under the awards IIS0209111 and EIC-9972883. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). MMDB'04, November 13, 2004, Washington, DC, USA. ACM 1-58113-975-6/04/0011.