A Multi-Paradigm Video Querying System over the Web

Video data management over the Web is fast becoming one of the seminal topics for modern multimedia information systems. In this chapter we present an architecture of a multi-paradigm video querying system, along with its Web-based mechanisms that can offer a number of important features. To address the practical factors and concerns (such as resource cost and/or intellectual property concerns), video descriptions are separated from the raw/source video files. For better accessibility and interoperability, we adopt XML technology to make our system standard compatible (or XML-powered). In particular, the video description is extracted from the underlying storage (OODB) system, and the query result is sent back to the client as XML data description. As a result, our system can provide an efficient query server and support heavyweight clients. A prototype system manifesting these features has been developed based on OMG-CORBA and an object-oriented database engine.