What is a Multimedia Database?

An article by Anthony Clark    Comments Off

Generally, majority of businesses, schools and other institutions use multimedia data to store data and disseminate important information.  Multimedia data consists of digital images, sounds, videos, animation, graphics as well as text data.

During the past few years, the generating, processing and storing of multimedia data has grown immensely.  There are three factors that contributed to the growth of multimedia usage.  The first one is the use of personal computers as well as high-definition gadgets such as digital cameras, video cameras, scanners, printers and monitors.  Secondly, the use of the World Wide Web contributes to the multimedia data growth.  The internet is widely used nowadays, so the use of multimedia data is definitely in demand.  Lastly, certain software application requires multimedia usage, and subsequently, more applications will use multimedia data.

Purpose of a Multimedia Database

Multimedia is gifted with several exciting features.  Multimedia provides data for medicine, engineering, biology as well as social sciences.  It also helps in the development of new patterns for distant learners as well as group and personal pursuit.  Because of the immense growth of multimedia data usage, users will need a database to store significant multimedia data in order to provide consistency, credibility as well as accessibility.  For the user’s point of view, the use of a multimedia database will provide convenience as well as easy manipulation and storage of significant information.

A multimedia database is, by far, more enhanced than the traditional database.  In order to manage a large volume of information, it is necessary to utilize some of the inherent qualities of the multimedia database.  With the use of the multimedia database, users will consequently provide unity on processing, storing and manipulating data as well as disseminating significant multimedia data to other databases.  Multimedia database also conforms to numerical constraints, which are definitely not found in traditional databases.

What’s Inside a Multimedia Database?

In order for a multimedia database to work, the database needs to manage several types of data.  The first type is the media data.  This data represents that of the digital images, audio as well as video which are captured, compressed as well as stored in the database.  The second type is the media format data.  This data pertains to the format of the media data after it undergoes processing and encoding.  This data format consists of sampling rate, resolution as well as encoding schemes.  The third type is the media keyword data or also known as the content descriptive data.  This data contains the pertinent information of a particular statistics.  For instance, in a video, the media keyword data contains the place, data and time of recording.  The last type is the media feature data, also known as the content dependent data.  This data pertains to the essential features of the media data.  For example, the media feature data presents the types of colors, textures as well as shapes used in the images.

Keep in mind that the multimedia database may require the use of the media keyword data and media format data for searching information, while the media format data is utilized to show the retrieved information.