Inheritance of Multimedia Class Having Temporal-Spatial Structures

摘要

Many new multimedia applications require capabilities not only for representing and storing temporal-spatial structures of multimedia data but also for reusing them. This paper is an effort to provide an inheritance mechanism for efficiently reusing the previously defined temporal-spatial structures. In this mechanism, temporal-spatial structures are defined within the database schema on the class level and are inherited into all subclasses in a class hierarchy. This paper formally develops an inheritance function which can be applied to all possible combinations of classes having various temporal-spatial structures. The proposed mechanism enables users to incrementally define the complex temporal-spatial structures without schema redefinition overhead.