Storing and Querying Multimedia Presentations from XML Documents
SPONSORS: National Science Foundation - NSF,
Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey - TÜBITAK
ABSTRACT:
In this research, we propose to investigate query languages for XML, the Extensible Markup Language which is proposed as a standard web markup language by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). More specifically, we propose to investigate querying XML documents containing multimedia presentations.
A multimedia presentation is a synchronized and interactive delivery of multimedia data, which includes video, audio, text, etc. to users. Current commercial multimedia presentation authoring tools store and play out such presentations as stand-alone, file-based, units. Recent research has introduced the notions of storing presentations into databases, and content- and structured-based querying of such presentations.
Web, in its ever-expanding functionality, now has large number of multimedia data (with some "presentation-like" delivery), such as those found in on-line manuals and electronic books. The markup language XML carries the capability to describe and play out multimedia presentations. Also the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), recently proposed as a multimedia presentation specification language, is a recommendation from W3C for standardizing multimedia presentation specifications. SMIL is specified using XML; i.e., a SMIL document is an XML document that defines a multimedia presentation. However, SMIL does not deal with content-based data semantics specification. And, storing, delivering, and querying of multimedia presentations using XML documents are not yet researched.
XML is an extensible meta-language, and XML documents can have self-described data semantics. The semantics of an XML document is available to any application that processes the XML document. This research has two goals:
Investigate ways of storing XML documents into databases, and querying databases populated with XML documents.
Extend XML with presentations, and investigate XML-embedded multimedia presentation storage, delivery, and querying. XML and SMIL specifications do not yet incorporate content-based multimedia data modeling within XML documents. Present semistructured data manipulation languages and data models do not yet deal with multimedia, much less presentations and synchronization issues for XML documents in the web. Thus, there is a need to
* model content-based multimedia data as well as multimedia presentations within XML,
* revise/merge/consolidate XML language proposals, and multimedia data/presentation languages, and
* investigate the query processing issues of the resulting newly defined languages.