Let's talk about it: dialogues with multimedia databases - Database support for human activity

We describe two scenarios of user tasks in which access To multimedia data plays a significant role. Because current multimedia databases cannot support these tasks, we introduce three new requirements on multimedia databases: multimedia objects should be active objects, querying is an interaction process, and query processing uses multiple representations. We discuss three techniques to handle multimedia objects as active objects. Also, we introduce a promising database architecture to meet the new user requirements. Agents within the database handle objects' representations, and a search engine on top of a conventional database handles relevance feedback and multiple representations. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.