MQuery: A visual query language for multimedia, timeline and simulation data

This paper describes a visual query language that can express questions over multimedia, timeline and simulation data using a single set of related query constructs. A uniform model for multimedia types organizes image, sound, video and long text data in a consistent manner, giving multimedia schemas and queries a degree of data independence even for these complex data types. Information that possesses an intrinsic temporal element can be queried using a construct called a stream. Streams can be aggregated into parallel multistreams, thus providing a structure for querying and retrieving multiple sets of time-based information. The unified stream construct permits real-time measurements, numerical simulation data and visualizations of that data to be aggregated and manipulated using the same set of operators. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited