Metadata Transformation and Management with Oracle interMedia

The management of multimedia data in object-relational dat abase systems presents a challenging prob- lem for extracting, processing, and managing associated me tadata. This information is usually embed- ded within the media source using proprietary formats, thusnot easily accessible in a uniform fashion. This poses a need for a series of structural transformationsto ensure that the metadata gathering pro- cess produces a unified representation across a multitude ofmedia sources. The ultimate goal of these transformations is to consolidate management efforts for d iverse sources of media. This paper presents the Oracle MediaAnnotator, an extensib le architecture developed to be used with Oracle8i interMedia. The MediaAnnotator supports automat ic extraction and transformation of meta- data into logical annotations. This approach allows for thecreation of unified metadata repositories, which can then be used for indexing and searching. The extens ible nature of this architecture makes it applicable to any multimedia domain. The MediaAnnotator le verages Oracle8i interMedia to tie together the multimedia data and its logical annotations; this offer s greater manageability of media archives and opens the possibility for new applications which integratemultimedia content with other user data.