A Meta-Index to Integrate Specific Indexes: Application to Multimedia

Although applications such as news, e-learning, ecommerce require multimedia data of different types to coexist, data for each media type are often managed separately because technically they do not have much in common. The common approach for providing the user with an integrated multimedia database is to build an application layer that presents a unified interface and deals with the right mono-medium sub-system depending on the user request. The problem is that this approach does not fully integrate the underlying systems. Another solution is to push the integration into the query processor. This second approach necessitates to have access to the query processor which is not always possible especially if the multimedia system is using a commercial DBMS underneath. In this paper, we propose a meta-index that hosts different specific indexes and integrates the sub-query results to be returned to the user.