A Native Extensible XML Query Processor Towards Efficient and Effective MPEG-7 Querying

In recent years the production of massive amounts of visual information has led to the arrival of very large multimedia Digital Libraries (DLs). The key to support efficient search and management operations in such repositories is to exploit metadata information for digital media, such as MPEG-7 based ones, which seem to be the most widely accepted. The underlying XML syntax, together with the high versatility of the provided constructs, make it easy to specify significant and complex queries, however executing them efficiently on huge quantities of data is not a trivial task. In this paper we provide an overview of the XSiter system, a native and extensible XML query processor providing very high performance in general XML querying settings and whose flexible architecture can be easily enhanced to better support the peculiarities of retrieving multimedia objects through MPEG-7 annotation metadata. Further, we consider possible "use-cases" and tasks related to multimedia and video DLs querying and management which our system can successfully accomplish.