Reusing animations in databases for multimedia presentations

Multimedia presentations and their applications are becoming more and more popular in most spheres of industry and everyday life. A database approach could help in querying presentations and reusing parts of existing presentations to create new ones. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented model built on a temporal interval tree structure for managing multimedia presentations as temporal databases. This model is based on a class hierarchy that reflects the temporal relationships among multimedia data comprising a presentation. Specifically, we will discuss extending this approach to reusing animations in our presentation database system. Hence, in this paper, based on the objectoriented data model and the database system, we propose storing animations in a database of 3D geometric models and motion descriptions. The reuse of 3D models is a common practice, unlike reusing motion which is rare because it is not as straightforward. Thus, we will explore more on motion reuse techniques. A set of generic and animation-oriented operations are given, which can be used to query and adapt animations for multimedia presentations based on their metadata.