This papaer presents a data model and the database system architecture to handle multimedia data, especially video (or image sequence) data. A new scheme AIS diagram" is introduced, by which all informations about entities and relationships among bitmap frames or textual informations are described in a uniform way. We focus on the integration of engineering data. The most important problem to be solved is how to capture the objects" in each frame and to represent them in the data model. For this purpose we propose physical cut" and logical cut" as a unit of information in image sequences and, using those concepts, we developed a prototype system for multimedia data processing on a conventional database system.

This paper presents a semantic data model called AIS", in which we can directly embody entities", and associations" between entity sets. For the formal foundation of the concepts for modelling information, we should choose as few as possible basic concepts. From this point of view, three kinds of association, existential association", Cartesian aggregation" and referential association" are proposed. Especially, in existential association, we can represent order" of entities when the entities are developed from one original entity. We also present the operators which can extract information from the given database and construct complex objects" temporarily. As the complex objects have hierarchical structures, that is, an object may consist of sub-objects and the subobject may consist of sub-subobjects, we should provide some mean to watch and scan a level of subobjects in an object. For this purpose, we introduce a new notion rank descriptor", which enables users to specify a set of subobjects of same depth, and to apply them operators simultaneously. Finally we discuss about a logical data structure and its manipulation system ASD, to show the capability of efficient implementation of AIS.

This paper surveys recent research activities on three major areas of digital media information base, namely, video database systems as a typical example of temporal application, database systems for mixed reality as an instance of spatial application, and kansei management for digital media retrieval as a case of humanistic feelings application. Current research results by the project Advanced Database Systems for Integration of Media and User Environments are reported.