Automatic Mapping of MPEG-7 Descriptions to Relational Database

MPEG-7 is considered an important standard for the description of multimedia content. It is expected that variety of applications based on MPEG-7 media descriptions will be set up in the near future. Basically, MPEG-7 media descriptions are XML documents following media description schemes defined with a variant of XML Schema. Therefore, efficient storage mechanisms for large amount of MPEG-7 descriptions are required. Because of many advantages, the relational DBMS is the best choice for storing such XML documents. However, the existing RDBMS-based XML storage solutions cannot fulfill all the requirements for MPEG-7 descriptions management. In this paper, we present a new automatic approach for mapping MPEG-7 media descriptions to relational database, called RelMPEG-7. RelMPEG-7 automatically generates the relational database tables along with the appropriate columns datatypes and constraints, this is performed by automatic analysis of the XML Schema to extract necessary information from it. This approach is intended to meet almost all the essential requirements to best store the MPEG-7 documents in a relational database, and as a complementary to the existing solutions.