This research program focuses on the application of database technology to multimedia data. Ideally, hundreds of television and radio broadcasts would be covered by a database application. This database system can notify its clients whenever interesting data becomes available. The only query facility provided uses manually added textual descriptions of these multimedia data. We believe that true multimedia database systems provide content-based retrieval facilities.
Multimedia objects in such a database are first-class citizens.
It should be possible to formulate queries referring to several types of data simultaneously. For example, a user may be interested in web pages about inference networks containing a photograph of Bayes. Full-text retrieval systems have been developed since the early sixties. Many ideas from this field can relatively easy be applied to multimedia data. Text retrieval systems were the first information systems to deal with approximate queries, using similarity between documents to drive the retrieval process.