When people watch such motion pictures as documentaries or educational-type films, it is very natural for them to be interested in moving objects in the movies and be eager to know the detailed information related to these object. Therefore, a mechanism that enables users to directly pick up object information from motion pictures is necessary to make a movie system feasible. For this reason, we are researching techniques on using objects in motion pictures as hypermedia anchors. We call a movie system that provides the above mechanism a video hypermedia system. An object in a motion picture can generally be considered as a complex object which includes many parts. To allow users to obtain information related to each part, a system must be able to provide anchors corresponding to each part in each complex object. For this, authors cannot help defining all anchors in all frames, since the visual status of each part varies from moment to moment. This paper presents our approach for managing objects in motion pictures for video hypermedia systems. The main feature of the proposed method is to apply computer graphic techniques to the defining of anchors for a complex object.

Real-time database systems have the properties of database and real-time systems. This means they must keep timing constraints of transactions as required in real-time systems, and at the same time ensure database consistency as required in database systems. Real-time concurrency control is a general approach for resolving this conflict. In this type of control, a concurrency control technique for database systems is integrated with a task scheduling technique for real-time systems. This paper surveys previous studies on real-time concurrency control and considers future research directions.

This paper describes the architecture and storage structure of a new interactive multimedia information system called VideoReality. VideoReality is based on a visual conducting model, which describes the information retrieval process that occurs when people observe visible objects in the real world. VideoReality provides a spatial and temporal spread of a virtual video space from a set of stored video streams. The video space has a three-layered structure similar to that of the ANSI/X3/SPARC three-schema architecture. Users can move their eyes and watch objects freely in the video space, just as if they were viewing the real world. This paper also presents a prototype application system called Electronic Aquarium'

In retrieving information from databases widely distributed in a network, the first thing to do is to search and find the database where the required information is stored. We call this the information searches rather than the retrievals. In this paper, we present a search and retrieval method for multimedia information, especially images. First, we formalize the general elements of information search and introduce a new search concept based on entropy reduction. Next, we discuss recent new technologies for image retrieval and introduce a new image retrieval system called VideoReality. Third, we present several methods of searching in the network- for example, the Internet robot TITAN, and a new search method for images distributed in the network that is based on the hierarchical structure of image retrieval. Finally, we discuss the network control and design concepts appropriate for information search and retrival.