MPEG-7 is a very promising standard for the description of multimedia content. Cer-tainly, means for the adequate management of large amounts of MPEG-7 media descrip-tions are needed in the near future. Essentially, MPEG-7 media descriptions are XML documents following media description schemes defined with an extension of XML Schema named MPEG-7 DDL. However, XML database solutions available today are not suitable for the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions. They typically neglect the type in-formation available with media description schemes and represent the basic contents of media descriptions as text. But storing non-textual multimedia data typically contained in media descriptions such as melody contours and object shapes textually and forcing ap-plications to access and process such data as text is neither adequate nor efficient. In this paper, we therefore propose the Typed Document Object Model (TDOM), a data model for XML documents that can benefit from available schema definitions and represent the basic contents of a document in a typed fashion. Through these typed representations, applications can access and work with multimedia data contained in MPEG-7 media de-scriptions in way that is appropriate to the particular type of the data. Thereby, TDOM constitutes a solid foundation for an XML database solution enabling the adequate man-agement of MPEG-7 media descriptions. 1 1

MPEG-7 constitutes a promising standard for the description of multimedia content. It can be expected that a lot of applications based on MPEG-7 media descriptions will be set up in the near future. Therefore, means for the adequate management of large amounts of MPEG-7-compliant media descriptions are certainly desirable. Essentially, MPEG-7 media descriptions are XML documents following media description schemes defined with a variant of XML Schema. Thus, it is reasonable to investigate current database solutions for XML documents regarding their suitability for the management of these descriptions. In this paper, we motivate and present critical requirements for the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions and the resulting consequences for XML database solutions. Along these requirements, we discuss current state-of-the-art database solutions for XML documents. The analysis and comparison unveil the limitations of current database solutions with respect to the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions and point the way to the need for new solutions adequate to MPEG-7. 1