Decision Support Systems And Multimedia Databases

1. Decision Support Systems And Multimedia Databases

2. Outline • Decision Support System • Problem and Solution types • Characteristics of Decision support system • Capabilities of a DSS • Levels and components of DSS • Conclusion • Multimedia Systems • Why multimedia is a problem for databases ? • Support for searching • Types of Databases • Relational Databases and Multimedia, Example - Access • Object Relational Databases and Multimedia , Example - Oracle • Object Oriented Databases and Multimedia , Example – Jasmine • Conclusion

3. Decision Support Systems • Decision support systems (DSS) • Offer potential to assist in solving both semi-structured and unstructured problems

4. Decision Making as a Component of Problem Solving Intelligence Decisionmaking Design Problemsolving Choice Implementation Monitoring

5. Solution Types • Optimization model • Finding the best solution • Satisfying model • Finding a good -- but not necessarily the best -- solution to a problem • Heuristics • Commonly accepted guidelines or procedures that usually find a good solution

6. Problem Solving Factors • Multiple decision objectives • Increased alternatives • Increased competition • The need for creativity • Social and political actions • International aspects • Technology • Time

7. Characteristics of a DSS (1) • Handles large amounts of data from different sources • Provides report and presentation flexibility • Offers both textual and graphical orientation

8. Characteristics of a DSS (2) • Supports topdown analysis • Performs complex, sophisticated analysis and comparisons using advanced software packages • Supports optimization, “satisficing”, and heuristic approaches

9. Characteristics of a DSS (3) • Performs different types of analyses • “What-if” analysis • Makes hypothetical changes to problem and observes impact on the results • Simulation • Duplicates features of a real system • Goal-seeking analysis • Determines problem data required for a given result

10. Goal Seeking Example • You know the desired result • You want to know the required input(s) • Example: • Microsoft Excel’s “Goal Seek” and “Solver” functions

11. Excel demo

12. Capabilities of a DSS (1) • Supports • Problem solving phases • Different decision frequencies Merge withanother company? How many widgets should I order? low high Frequency

13. Capabilities of a DSS (2) • Highly structured problems • Straightforward problems, requiring known facts and relationships. • Semi-structured or unstructured problems • Complex problems wherein relationships among data are not always clear, the data may be in a variety of formats, and are often difficult to manipulate or obtain

14. Decision Making Levels Strategic Tactical Operational Operational-levelmanagers involved withdaily decisions Strategic-level managersinvolved with long-termdecisions High Low Decision Frequency

15. Web-Based Decision Support Systems • Web-based decision support systems • Decision support system software provides business intelligence through web browser clients that access databases either through the Internet or a corporate intranet

16. Components of a DSS • Model management software (MMS) • Coordinates the use of models in the DSS • Model base • Provides decision makers with access to a variety of models • Dialogue manager • Allows decision makers to easily access and manipulate the DSS

17. Database Model base DBMS MMS Externaldatabases Access to theinternet, networks,and other computersystems External databaseaccess Dialogue manager

18. Conclusion • Decision Support systems inherit characteristics of drill down analysis for complex problems that range in various domains. • Historic and current change patterns can be studied analytically by utilizing long term Databases maintained to aid in decision support system.

19. Multimedia Databases

20. Topics Covered • Why multimedia is a problem for databases • Support for searching • Types of Databases • Relational Databases and Multimedia • Example - Access • Object Relational Databases and Multimedia • Example - Oracle • Object Oriented Databases and Multimedia • Example - Jasmine

21. The problem • Data increasingly means not just numbers and small strings but multimedia data as well – structured (text, images, video, audio, VR, etc.) • Databases promise: • well structured data organisation • efficient storage of large amounts of data • querying • transactional support for concurrent users • If you include multimedia data • multimedia is large and may swamp other data • multimedia data structures are completely different from standard database structures • multimedia data structures do not easily lend themselves to content-based searching

22. Data integration • Databases already integrate various kinds of data, numbers, dates, small text strings. • They do this by the use of domains • i.e. each atomic value in the database belongs to one of a small number of types • each type has two aspects: • a range of values which are acceptable • some operations which are available

23. Cont …. • the schema indicates a domain for each part of the database and the DBMS enforces the domain constraint • e.g. in a Relational Database, each column is assigned a domain • Therefore a DBMS must provide domain types for any kind of data that they wish to house and theoverall structure will deal with the integration

24. MM Data types • TEXT • GRAPHICS • MPEG • ANIMATION • VIDEO • AUDIO

25. Examples of Multimedia Databases • There are numerous different types of multimedia databases, including: • The Authentication Multimedia Database • The Identification Multimedia Database is a data comparison of one-to-many • A newly-emerging type of multimedia database, is the Biometrics Multimedia Database;

26. Domain types of MM data • DBMS typically provide three different kinds of domain for multimedia data: • Large object domains, sequences of data often of two kinds • Binary Large Objects – BLOBs – which are an unstructured sequence of bytes • Character Large Objects – CLOBs – which are an unstructured sequence of characters • File references – instead of holding the data, a file reference contains a link to the data (OLE in Access) • Genuine multimedia data types – (Oracle and Jasmine)

27. Cont … • There is an important difference between the last of these and the first two: • multimedia data types present the possibility of exploiting the structure of the data for querying and manipulation • large objects at best allow you to extract sections or to concatenate them • file references mean that the DBMS has no data at all

28. Querying MM data • A DBMS permits a user to search the database by content e.g. give the name of the student with matriculation number 0123456We would like to do the same with multimedia data e.g. give the pictures painted by Picasso or sound files with female singer hitting top C • With standard data this is easy – numeric and string operators are well understood With multimedia data this is more difficult and requires some method of identifying contents of which there are two kinds:

29. Cont … • Automatic identification • an algorithm takes the data and returns a measure which can be compared – e.g. of blackness • Manual identification • a person examines the data and catalogues it – e.g. in a table of pictures, there is a column for the picture and another for the painter

30. Types of Database • There are three kinds of DBMS that might be used for housing multimedia data. • Relational DBMS store everything as First Normal Form tables • all data items are atomic and are held in rectangular tables • data can only be related if they are in one or in two records connected by a common value (foreign key) • records are identified only by content • it is difficult (if not impossible) to extend the set of domains

31. Cont … • Object-oriented DBMS store everything as classes of objects • all data is held as components of objects (like Java variables) • data is related by object reference (i.e. one class variable has a type which is another class and the values of that variable are instances of that class) • the set of classes is extensible and so you can freely create domains

32. Cont … • Object-relational DBMS are fundamentally relations but are not First Normal Form • the values in cells can be object references as well as atomic values • new types can be defined

33. How can we use these different types? • In a relational database, you can have: • domain types for large objects • using a string type for file names • extra file types as in OLE in Access • In an object-oriented database, you can have: • specially designed classes for multimedia • In an object-relational database, you can have: • specially designed types for multimedia

34. Large Object Types in Oracle and SQL3 • Oracle and SQL3support three large object types: • BLOB - The BLOB domain type stores unstructured binary data in the database. BLOBs can store up to four gigabytes of binary data. • CLOB – The CLOB domain type stores up to four gigabytes of single-byte character set data • NCLOB - The NCLOB domain type stores up to four gigabytes of fixed-width and varying width multi-byte national character set data * SQL3 is a significant extension to standard SQL which turns into a full object-based language

35. Oracle interMediaAudio, Image, and Video • Oracle interMedia supports multimedia storage, retrieval, and management of: • BLOBs stored locally in Oracle8i onwards and containing audio, image, or video data • BFILEs, stored locally in operating system-specific file systems and containing audio, image or video data • URLs containing audio, image, or video data stored on any HTTP server such as Oracle Application Server, Netscape Application Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Apache HTTPD server, and Spyglass servers • Streaming audio or video data stored on specialized media servers such as the Oracle Video Server

36. OO databases – e.g. Jasmine • Jasmine is an Object-Oriented database and has an application known as Studio is its development environment • It comes with a number of built in classes include four multimedia classes: • Picture - • Image – • Video – • Audio - • These come with manipulation and compression facilities They also have been made to fit well with Java Media Framework

37. Conclusions • At present you can not do much with MM data, there are two reasons for this: 1. It is very large • indexing on multimedia data is not reasonable nor is storing a default value • other retrieval may be slowed down • transactions may be compromised 2. The properties are not well understood or implementable

38. Cont .. • At the moment, there is no reason for putting multimedia data into a relational database • it just slows everything down • and you can’t do very much • You could use an object relational or object oriented database • now you can do more • but the products are immature • and everything will be slow

39. Cont … • There are three main reasons for integrating multimedia data with a database: • 1. Cataloguing the data • a column for file names is good enough • 2. Decorating Reports • The OLE approach works well here Otherwise a file name column and a simple application for generating the reports would do • 3. Web Applications • Again a file name column is good enough

40. Review Questions • What is a Decision Support System ? • What type of problems DSS address ? • Explain components of DSS system ? • What makes Multimedia databases different from traditional databases ? • Name different types of MM database. • Compare, contrast and provide examples for : • Relational Databases and Multimedia • Object Relational Databases and Multimedia • Object Oriented Databases and Multimedia

41. Useful Links • http://www.peterindia.net/MultimediaDatabase.html • http://www.tech-faq.com/multimedia-database.html • http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7641273/Multimedia-Database-Content-and-Structure • http://ftp.it.murdoch.edu.au/units/ICT219/Papers%20for%20transfer/papers%20on%20IR/IR15_MM%20Database.pdf

42. Thanks !