The Multimedia Database group is the youngest group at CS 6.
It was established in October 2001
when Prof. Meyer-Wegener returned to Erlangen.
(In fact, this group could also be called very old,
since Prof. Meyer-Wegener had already worked on multimedia databases
when he spent the years from 1990 to 1993 at CS 6.)
The overall goal of the research efforts is
to combine data independence with real-time support
in the management of multimedia data.
Data independence means
that users retrieve multimedia data in any format they need,
and the system converts its (hidden) internal representation
to that format, if necessary.
Real-time support means
that delivery of timed multimedia data (audio and video)
can be done at a given rate,
so that a suitable quality of service is achieved.
In todays object-relational DBMS,
it is possible to achieve the former,
but not the latter,
while media servers
come close to real-time,
but hardly offer any data independence.
The group uses modeling as well as implementation
as approaches.
Modeling exploits results from the field of real-time systems
such as statistical rate-monotonic scheduling,
jitter-constrained periodic event streams,
and imprecise computations.
It decribes the behavior of converters
organized in conversion graphs.
The converters should obey the interfaces
of a component model.
Implementation builds converters
according to these models
and deploys them
in the context of a real-time operating system.
