Integration of a relational database with multimedia data

We propose a method for integrating a preexisting conventional database system with a multimedia server in a multidatabase environment. In the multidatabase environment, changes to the preexisting database system are not allowed because such changes are too expensive. For the integration, high-level semantic description of multimedia data is modeled using the enhanced entity-relationship (EER) model to support content-based retrieval of multimedia data. The EER design is translated into a schema of the preexisting database system and then the translated schema is integrated with the preexisting database schema. The content description can be used to locate pertinent multimedia data, and the identifiers are used to access the multimedia data stored in the multimedia server. However, with only a simple schema representation of the semantic description of multimedia data, high levels of recall and precision of queries may not be obtained because conventional database systems provide only exact matching answers to the query. Thus, we extended the conventional query processing mechanism by providing a modified cooperative query answering mechanism.