/MMDA

Primary LanguageHTML

MMDA

The MMDA allows the users to name, annotate, store, and organize collections of data files into data aggregates called Data-Aggregates (DAGR for short). A DAGR may contain an arbitrary number of multimedia files, e.g. text documents, images, audio, video, and other previously created DAGRs. The system should provide functionality for storing, searching and retrieving the DAGR database using the DAGR’s name, or keywords in their annotation, and other metadata (see below) that is automatically generated at the time of its creation. Each DAGR must be assigned a Globally Unique Identifier (see Wikipedia) that can be generated by an online server like http://www.guidgen.com/ or by code that is available on the Internet such as http://wiki.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/SBP/Global+ID+Generator, code which you can run on your machine. The components of the DAGRs are either locally stored files generated from scratch, or obtained via a web browser (URL), received through e-mail, or other DAGRs. Each of the DAGR components, including URLs, receives its own GUID which is then linked with the GUID of the containing DAGR. You can think of a DAGR as a collection component GUIDs some of which reference local files and some external URLs. A very important feature of a DAGR is that it is light weight. It contains only references to either local files or URLs to external content. A DAGR does not contain heavy weight content but still encapsulates all the metadata for materializing the referenced content. This makes a DAGR very versatile because it can be sent by email or short messages. For transfers, think of it as a variation of Dropbox or Filelink. The MMDA will store and retrieve DAGR metadata using meta-data attributes (document creator/author, the creation/modification time, the size of the document, but not the complete content of it. When a document is stored in the MMDA database, a new DAGR is named for the document and can have its own annotations that describe it. The DAGR database will also capture metadata about DAGRs, creation and deletion time, creator’s name, and whether or not it contains component DAGRs. Because Multi-media files may contain references to other files (e.g. an HTML file may contain images, audio, video, and URL references) it is important to capture the connections between the components of the HTML documents for maintaining and discovering broken links and other reachability queries. It should be emphasized that the MMDA is mainly concerned with design of a database that stores metadata. The design should be general to model all possible files stored in a computer and named grouping of such files, DAGRs, and/or other DAGRs. You have to makes sure that the design does not have idiosyncratic features to the particular dataset that you will use to demonstrate the project. The metadata database should be able to answer queries about the stored files and the user defined named DAGRs. The project would have to rely on the OS for opening and/or displaying the underlying objects