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The ongoing MPEG-7 standardization activity aims at creating a standard for describing multimedia content in order to facilitate the interpretation of the associated information content. Attempting to address a broad range of applications, MPEG-7 has defined a flexible framework consisting of Descriptors, Description Schemes, and Description Definition Language. Descriptors and Description Schemes describe features, structure and semantics of multimedia objects. They are written in the Description Definition Language (DDL). In the most recent revision, DDL applies XML (Extensible Markup Language) Schema with MPEG-7 extensions. DDL has constructs that support inclusion, inheritance, reference, enumeration, choice, sequence, and abstract type of Description Schemes and Descriptors. In order to enable multimedia systems to use MPEG-7, a number of important problems in storing, retrieving and searching MPEG-7 documents need to be solved. This paper reports on initial finding on issues and solutions of storing and accessing MPEG-7 documents. In particular, we discuss the benefits of using a virtual document management framework based on XML Access Server (XAS) in order to bridge the MPEG-7 multimedia applications and database systems. The need arises partly because MPEG-7 descriptions need customized storage schema, indexing and search engines. We also discuss issues arising in managing dependence and cross-description scheme search.
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