Fuzzy Queries in Multimedia Database Systems
Ron Fagin
IBM Almaden Research Center
Abstract
There are essential differences between multimedia databases (which
may contain complicated objects, such as images), and traditional
databases. These differences lead to interesting new issues, and in
particular cause us to consider new types of queries. For example, in
a multimedia database it is reasonable and natural to ask for images
that are somehow "similar to" some fixed image. Furthermore, there
are different ways of obtaining and accessing information in a
multimedia database than information in a traditional database. For
example, in a multimedia database, it might be reasonable to have a
query that asks for, say, the top 10 images that are similar to a
fixed image. This is in contrast to a relational database, where the
answer to a query is simply a set. In this talk, we survey some new
issues that arise for multimedia queries. This talk, which will be
completely self-contained, was an invited talk at the 1998 ACM Symposium
on Principles of Database Systems.
Biography
Ronald Fagin is manager of the Foundations of Computer Science group
at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He
received his B.A. degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1967
and his Ph.D. in mathematics, with his thesis in finite-model theory,
from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973.