Information systems in general manage formatted data, and most of them use databases to store them adequately. While these systems work well, there are new requirements now to improve them towards the inclusion of multimedia data, i.e. images, graphics, video, and audio. Usually, multimedia data are stored in specialized servers which can cope with the requirements of real-time storage and delivery. Applications being developed today, however, need the services of both databases and these media servers. This paper presents a flexible architecture for the integration of media servers and databases into a single system.

In this work we will introduce a system for semantic information visualization and interactive manipulation implemented at CTU Prague. Explicit semantic information is necessary for automatic data processing. Commonly used data formats do not natively include such semantic information. The semantics must be therefore supplied in a separate file. The goal of our system is to enable creation of such semantic metadata for adaptation of multimedia content for use on mobile devices. The adaptation should modify the audio/video and vector graphics data in a logical manner to fulfill the user’s requirements while limiting the system resources necessary for data transport and rendering. The data themselves are designed for representation of the visual aspect only, therefore an additional semantic layer must have been added in a form of external metadata. This is achieved by the introduced system. The metadata creation itself is an interactive process where the human must be present. Nevertheless the system may support the process by appropriate visualization and assemble tools. In our case, we have concentrated on adaptation of complex 3D (VRML) and 2D (SVG) scenes for browsing and annotating on mobile devices. The named formats need to be adapted with the use of additional semantic metadata in MPEG-7 format. We are introducing a tool for creation of the MPEG-7 description. The system supports direct interconnection between the data (VRML) and the semantic visualization. Thanks to extendable system core supporting a plug-in mechanism we can easily add new visualization components and data formats. The implemented 3D visualization is fully interactive. For more efficient manipulation we have created a set of supportive tools for visualization of semantic relations, relation iteration, filtering and reasoning. The functionality was successfully tested and is currently used in the Mummy Mobile Knowledge Management project (IST-2001-37365).

management- using multimedia-rich portals for context-aware information processing with pocket-sized computers in facility management and at construction site) and is funded by Information Society DG of European Commission (IST-2001-37365). See

An increasing number of information systems today do not just manage formatted, table-structured data, but also multimedia data, e.g. video, audio, and image. Due to the special treatment they require, these data are often controlled by special servers, whereas the formatted data are stored in conventional databases. The applications, however, should have an integrated view of all their data, so that a single, yet distributed system is to be designed. In this paper, architectures for distributed multimedia database systems (DMMDBS) are presented that integrate conventional database systems, based on relational or object-oriented technology, with one or more multimedia data stores. These architectures are derived from a classification of DMMDBSs using the characteristics that are found to be most relevant for the applications. These characteristics include visibility of distribution, homogeneity of interfaces, and support of distributed transactions. Combining their possible values yi...