Retrieval and delivery of information in multimedia database systems

Abstract

EVA is a multimedia database system capable of storage, retrieval, management, analysis and delivery of objects of various media types, including text, audio, images and moving pictures. The interface language deals with the temporal and spatial aspects of multimedia information retrieval and delivery, in addition to the usual capabilities provided by the ordinary database languages. EVA has five classes of operations, namely: operations for querying and updating (i.e. editing) the multimedia information, operations for screen management, temporal operators, operators for specifying rules and constraints, and aggregation (computational) operators. EVA, an extension of the query language Varqa, is a functional language whose notation is based on that of conventional set theory. It is formally defined in an algebraic framework. EVA is object oriented and supports objects, object classes, attributes and methods of objects, and relationships between objects. The current implementation of EVA runs on several different platforms.