Hiroto Nagahisa

Hypermedia-based integration of plural multimedia databases

In this paper we present the application of the hypermedia system in a prototype that has new kinds of nodes and links for integration of plural multimedia databases. Usually, multimedia databases are independent of each other. They manage different contents and attributes of multimedia data by each different schema. Applications to retrieve from them have particular functions for efficient retrieval. In such a situation, a user would like to integrate the databases. For example, to retrieve a part number from a machine part database and to use the part number for ordering. It has been a difficult task without total reconstruction of the databases. To solve this problem, we propose hypermedia-based integration of plural multimedia databases, without changing the schema and interfaces of the already developed databases, but making linkage between them. The hypermedia system developed at our laboratory features integrating applications, and sharing the integrated applications. By using this system, it becomes possible that a node is what an application does and a link is a relation of what an application does to another one. Then, by linking these nodes, it becomes possible that a series of retrieval for multimedia databases is performed as one retrieval.