- Today most commercial database management software is extended to store and manage multimedia objects beside standard alphanumeric data. In this paper we study how such universal database systems can be used for implementing an adaptive multimedia digital library. We present a framework for efficient and flexible delivery of multimedia content based on the idea that multimedia objects are often stored redundantly to support broadest system access for diverse clients from heterogenous environments. There is a large number of alternatives for universal database systems to store and deliver multimedia data, since storage formats are not independent from each other but heavily interrelated by conversion tools. Partitioning the data formats into those that are physically stored in the database and those that are converted into a delivery format on-demand poses a nontrivial optimization problem. The framework presented here tackles this problem and has been implemented and evaluated with theToday most commercial database management software is extended to store and manage multimedia objects beside standard alphanumeric data. In this paper we study how such universal database systems can be used for implementing an adaptive multimedia digital library. We present a framework for efficient and flexible delivery of multimedia content based on the idea that multimedia objects are often stored redundantly to support broadest system access for diverse clients from heterogenous environments. There is a large number of alternatives for universal database systems to store and deliver multimedia data, since storage formats are not independent from each other but heavily interrelated by conversion tools. Partitioning the data formats into those that are physically stored in the database and those that are converted into a delivery format on-demand poses a nontrivial optimization problem. The framework presented here tackles this problem and has been implemented and evaluated with the commercial database management system DB2 Universal Database from IBM. Beside the core implementation, a graphical database administration tool has been developed to leverage the automated or semi-automated application of the optimization framework. First experiments with the implemented tools have proved substantial savings in the total costs.…
