Designing of Multimedia Databases

Many inherent characteristics of multimedia data have direct and indirect impacts on the design of multimedia databases. These include : the huge size of MMDBs, temporal nature, richness of content, complexity of representation and subjective interpretation. The major challenges in designing multimedia databases arise from several requirements they need to satisfy such as the following:
- Manage different types of input, output, and storage devices.
- Handle a variety of data compression and storage formats.
- Support different computing platforms and operating systems.
- Integrate different data models.
- Offer a variety of user-friendly query systems suited to different kinds of media.
- Handle different kinds of indices.
- Develop measures of data similarity that correspond well with perceptual similarity.
- Provide transparent view of geographically distributed data.
- Adhere to real-time constraints for the transmission of media data.
- Synchronize different media types while presenting to user.

DIFFICULTIES INVOLVED WITH MULTIMEDIA DATABASES :
The difficulty of making these different types of multimedia databases readily accessible to humans is:
- The tremendous amount of bandwidth they consume.
- Creating Globally-accepted data-handling platforms, such as Joomla, and the special considerations that these new multimedia database structures require.
- Creating a Globally-accepted operating system, including applicable storage and resource management programs need to accommodate the vast Global multimedia information hunger.
- Multimedia databases need to take into accommodate various human interfaces to handle 3D-interactive objects, in an logically-perceived manner.
- Accommodating the vast resources required to utilize artificial intelligence to it's fullest potential- including computer sight and sound analysis methods.
- The historic relational databases do not conveniently support content-based searches for multimedia content.

Multimedia databases are essential for efficient management and effective use of huge amounts of data. The diversity of applications using multimedia data, the rapidly changing technology, and the inherent complexities in the semantic representation, interpretation and comparison for similarity pose many challenges. MMDBs are still in their infancy.