Towards heterogeneous multimedia information systems: The garlic approach

We provide an overview of the Garlic project, a new project at the IBM Almaden Research Center. The goal of this project is to develop a system and associated tools for the management of large quantities of heterogeneous multimedia information. Garlic permits traditional and multimedia data to be stored in a variety of existing data repositories, including databases, files, text managers, image managers, video servers and so on; the data is seen through a unified schema expressed in an object-oriented data model and can be queried and manipulated using an object-oriented dialect of SQL, perhaps through an advanced query/browser tool that we are also developing. The Garlic architecture is designed to be extensible to new kinds of data repositories, and access efficiency is addressed via a `middleware' query processor that uses database query optimization techniques to exploit the native associative search capabilities of the underlying data repositories.