Abstract
A multimedia database is a controlled collection of multimedia data items such as text, images, graphic objects, video and audio. A multimedia database management system (DBMS) provides support for the creation, storage, access, querying and control of a multimedia database. The requirements of a multimedia DBMS are: multimedia data modeling; multimedia object storage; multimedia indexing, retrieval and browsing; and multimedia query support. This paper discusses a general framework for multimedia database systems and describes the requirements and architecture for these systems.