Multi-Media Database Language SL/B5 based on Screen Flow

A very significant goal for multi-media database systems ( MMDBS ) is the integrated management of unstructured data such as drawings, images, text and voice as well as formatted or structured data. So it is required for MMDBS to harmonize both multi-media data storage and processing capabilities. Traditional technology for data management is based on storage and retrieval of structured data of numerics and characters. But the current technological environment is not sufficient to implement practical application systems in the storage and processing of unstructured data. In order to overcome the problems involved in implementing MMDBS, this paper proposes a new multi-media data processing language SL/BS based on screen flow. A program of SLJB5 is represented by a collection of screens which are connected through what we have termed “screen call”. The -specificatione 6f Z&h screen may be divided into four parts, IMAGE for for>$ting multi-media data on a display terminal with@eak&s, FUNCTION for data entries and tram+ formations, DATABASE for database accesses and CALL for conditional call of other screens with parameters. The database is a collection of 5-tuple ( value, data type, attribute, entity, term of validity) which can include multimedia objects, meta-data, user information, security and integrity specification. The special database structure is called B6 structure. SL/B5 provides us powerful, flexible and friendly multi-media data processing capabilities based on flexible database structure B5. SL/B5 was specially designed to support development of information systems by naive end-users in considering the harmonization to B5.