An object-oriented multimedia database system for a news-on-demand application

We describe the design of a multimedia database management system for a distributed news-on-demand multimedia information system. News-on-demand is an application that uses broadband network services to deliver news articles to subscribers in the form of multimedia documents. Different news providers insert articles into the database, which are then accessed by users remotely, over a broadband, asynchronous transfer-mode (ATM) network. The particulars of our design are an object-oriented approach and strict adherence to international standards, in particular the Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) and Hy-Time. The multimedia database system has a visual query facility, which is also described in this paper. The visual query interface provides three major facilities for end users: presentation, navigation, and querying of multimedia news documents. The main focus, however, is the querying of multimedia objects stored in the database.