Multimedia Information Management in an Object-Oriented Database System
Darrell Woelk, Won Bae Kim · Very Large Data Bases · 1987
This paper describes the implementation of the Multimedia Information Manager (MIM) in the ORION object-oriented da- tabase system which is operational at MCC. We describe design objectives and implementation techniques that have satisfied the design objectives. Our design objectives in- clude extensibility, flexibility and efficiency in supporting the capture, storage, and presentation of many types of multi- media information. We have achieved extensibility by providing an object-ori- ented framework for multimedia information management. The framework consists of definitions of class hierarchies and a message passing protocol for not only the multimedia capture, storage, and presentation devices, but also the captured and stored multimedia objects. Both the class hier- archies and the protocol may be easily extended and/or modified by system developers and end users as they see fit. We have satisfied flexibility by supporting a variety of ways in which the end users may control the capture and presentation of multimedia information. Our implementation has achieved storage efficiency by using a technique for sharing storage blocks among multiple versions of a multi- media object, while achieving data transfer performance by directly interfacing the MIM to certain low level components of the ORION storage subsystem.