A metadata approach to multimedia database federations

Recent research in federated database systems has advanced in the direction of federations of multimedia databases. However, in each project studied, there has been little emphasis placed on the subject of metamodels. Conversely, standard database systems (relational, object-relational and object-oriented) define metadata models that lack multimedia and federation features. In this paper, a specification of a metadata architecture for a multimedia database federation is presented. The architecture is based on a new object-oriented metamodel that has support for multimedia types and federated metadata. By using this metamodel, administrators and users of a multimedia federation can determine precisely how data is structured and the types of operations that are possible.