The role of XML in generic and distributed multimedia management

Multimedia document management is an emerging topic, since the quantity and diversity of documents to be managed at either enterprise or global level is ever increasing. Current approaches are based on mark-up scripts. While mark-up scripts possess several advantages in the simplicity of representation and interchange of structured documents among loosely coupled systems, what they originally have been created for, they have disadvantages when applying them as the silver bullet for distributed data or object modeling, especially for generic multimedia management. We first describe the deficiencies arising from the notion mentioned above, then present a generic approach to alleviate those deficiencies. After that, we describe the realization of the generic approach using a model and an architecture. Then, we show the integration of markup scripts into the concept presented.