Visual query specification in a multimedia database system

In this paper we describe a visual interface for a Multimedia Database Management System (MDBMS). In spite of the technological advances in display devices, DBMS query languages are still linear in syntax as it was two decades ago. Although natural language interfaces have been found to be useful, natural language is ambiguous and difficult to process. For queries on standard (relational) data these difficulties may be easily avoided with the use of a visual, graphical interface to guide the user in specifying the query. For image and other media data which are ambiguous in nature, we use natural language processing combined with direct graphical access to the domain knowledge to interpret and evaluate the natural language query. The system fully supports graphical and image input/output in different formats. The combination of visual effect and natural language specification, the support of media data, and the allowance of incremental query specification are very effective to simplify the process of query specification not only for image or multimedia databases but also for all databases