Multimedia Databases provide features that allow users to store and query different types of multimedia information. The challenges involve locating multimedia sources that contain certain objects of interest. Applications of multimedia systems include static media like images, text, graphics and dynamic media like audio and video, which varies with time. Timeliness is required to display data within certain duration of time for continuity and synchronization to present in consistent view through proper data integration to users. The two aspects, which are essential for eliminating potential problems in the data transfer are—necessity for the buffer management and the disk access methods. New multimedia database systems could benefit such areas as concurrency control data abstraction transaction recovery, openness and access control. Further improvements are possible by changing the way we handle multimedia data, such as database management capabilities like searching, sharing and retrieving of data to meet the needs of various multimedia applications. The Web has wildly proliferated software for manipulating multimedia data. Some specific applications (existing) and future applications need to live with multimedia data. This trend is expected to go up in the days to come.

Nature of Multimedia Applications Multimedia data available in current systems involves Text, which is formatted or unformatted. Graphics include drawings and illustrations that are encoded using some descriptive standards. Images include drawings. Photographs encoded in standard formats such as bitmap, JPEG and MPEG. Animations are temporal sequences of image or graphic data. Video is a set of temporally sequenced photographic data for presentation at specified rates. Audio is a sample data generated from aural recordings in a string of bits in a digitized form. Repository Applications: A large amount of data as well as meta data is stored for retrieval purposes. Examples include repositories of space photographs, satellite images and radiology scanned pictures. Presentation Applications: Many applications involve multimedia data subject to temporal constraints. Audio and video data can be delivered by optimal viewing or listening conditions. They require the database management systems to deliver data at certain rates offering “quality of service” above a certain Threshold.

Multimedia Databases, multimedia information, data abstraction transaction recovery, multimedia applications, database management systems, concurrency control, Session Description Protocol, SDP, Simple Mail Transport Protocol, SMTP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, LDAP, User Datagram Protocol, UDP, Transmission Control Protocol, TCP.