Data modeling for news clip archive: A prototype solution

Abstract

Film, videotape and multimedia archive systems must address the issues of editing, authoring and searching at the media (i.e. tape) or sub media (i.e. scene) level in addition to the traditional inventory management capabilities associated with the physical media. This paper describes a prototype of a database design for the storage, search and retrieval of multimedia and its related information. It also provides a process by which legacy data can be imported to this schema. The Continuous Media Index, or Comix system is the name of the prototype. An implementation of such a digital library solution incorporates multimedia objects, hierarchical relationships and timecode in addition to traditional attribute data. Present video and multimedia archive systems are easily migrated to this architecture. Comix was implemented for a videotape archiving system. It was written for, and implemented using IBM Digital Library version 1.0. A derivative of Comix is currently in development for customer specific applications. Principles of the Comix design as well as the importation methods are not specific to the underlying systems used.