The relationship between IR and multimedia databases

Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient. Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval. Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database. First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database. Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer. Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback. We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing. We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system.