An Adaptive Document Management System for Shared Multimedia Data

We present a methodology for managing information resources by permitting aggregations of mixed-media documents to be interactively defined, shared, and managed using relational database management technology in concert with an extended object-oriented data model. This hybrid approach, based on our polymorphic object model (POM), allows the definition and instantiation of new types of compound documents without requiring modifications to be made to the underlying database schema. Existing documents and results from database queries are dynamically organized into individually meaningful categories as objects using a predicate-based mechanism. Furthermore, we developed a prototype document management system based on the POM. Analysis indicates that gains in flexibility are traded for slightly increased amounts of meta-data management overhead and document retrieval latencies when compared to conventional DBMS technology.