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Provides an overview of the Garlic project, a new project at the IBM Almaden Research Center. The goal of this project is to develop a system and associated tools for the management of large quantities of heterogeneous multimedia information. Garlic permits traditional and multimedia data to he stored in a variety of existing data repositories, including databases, files, text managers, image managers, video servers, and so on; the data is seen through a unified schema expressed in an object-oriented data model and can be queried and manipulated using an object-oriented dialect of SQL, perhaps through an advanced query/browser tool that we are also developing. The Garlic architecture is designed to be extensible to new kinds of data repositories, and access efficiency is addressed via a "middleware" query processor that uses database query optimization techniques to exploit the native associative search capabilities of the underlying data repositories. >

The remainder of this paper discusses the major issues related to the development of data models for scientific visualization which were identified by the data model subgroup at the IEEE Workshop on Database Issues in Visualization held in October 1993 in San Jose, California. The issues include the need to develop a reasonable taxonomy to apply to data models, the definition of metadata (or ancillary data), the notion of levels of abstraction available for defining a data model, the nature and role of queries in a data model, and the effects of data errors on a data model.

A major focus of recent database research has been extensible database management systems (EDBMS). These systems' goal is to accommodate the increasing amount of digitized data that is different in structure, in size and in processing needs from traditional transaction data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for example, have developed effective and specialized data representation and analysis techniques for spatial data that must be supported by any underlying DBMS. In this paper we show how EDBMS technology can support GIS applications through powerful data modeling and data management functions that are analogous to, and integrated with, those employed for managing traditional data.

The goal of the Garlic [1] project is to build a multimedia information system capable of integrating data that resides in different database systems as well as in a variety of non-database data servers. This integration must be enabled while maintaining the independence of the data servers, and without creating copies of their data. "Multimedia" should be interpreted broadly to mean not only images, video, and audio, but also text and application specific data types (e.g., CAD drawings, medical objects, …). Since much of this data is naturally modeled by objects, Garlic provides an object-oriented schema to applications, interprets object queries, creates execution plans for sending pieces of queries to the appropriate data servers, and assembles query results for delivery back to the applications. A significant focus of the project is support for "intelligent" data servers, i.e., servers that provide media-specific indexing and query capabilities [2]. Database optimization technology is being extended to deal with heterogeneous collections of data servers so that efficient data access plans can be employed for multi-repository queries.A prototype of the Garlic system has been operational since January 1995. Queries are expressed in an SQL-like query language that has been extended to include object-oriented features such as reference-valued attributes and nested sets. In addition to a C++ API, Garlic supports a novel query/browser interface called PESTO [3]. This component of Garlic provides end users of the system with a friendly, graphical interface that supports interactive browsing, navigation, and querying of the contents of Garlic databases. Unlike existing interfaces to databases, PESTO allows users to move back and forth seamlessly between querying and browsing activities, using queries to identify interesting subsets of the database, browsing the subset, querying the content of a set-valued attribute of a particularly interesting object in the subset, and so on.

Describes the design and implementation of QBlSM (Query By Interactive, Spatial Multimedia), a prototype for querying and visualizing 3D spatial data. The first application is in an area in medical research, in particular, Functional Brain Mapping. The system is built on top of the Starburst DBMS extended to handle spatial data types, specifically, scalar fields and arbitrary regions of space within such fields. The authors list the requirements of the application, discuss the logical and physical database design issues, and present timing results from their prototype. They observed that the DBMS' early spatial filtering results in significant performance savings because the system response time is dominated by the amount of data retrieved, transmitted, and rendered. >