COMIB: Composite Icon Browser for multimedia databases

COMIB(COMposite Icon Browser) is a graphical user interface for retrieval of multimedia databases. It gives users the effect of browsing and navigating multimedia objects simultaneously in a screen using composite icons, that may be thumbnails of the several nested attribute values of those objects. Users can specify these attributes with a mouse while browsing the visualized aggregation hierarchy. Both querying and browsing can be interleaved via query reformulation. We show how these features of COMIB overcome the three drawbacks of the browsing paradigm such as no overview of many objects, the repetitious short-sighted navigation, and the weak presentation of a multimedia object. We also explain the retrieval mechanism algebraically and describe the implementation of COMIB based on this mechanism.