In this chapter, we propose a distributed multimedia data management architecture, which can efficiently store and retrieve multimedia data across several nodes of a Grid environment. The main components of the proposed system comprises of a distributed multidimensional index structure, a distributed query manager handling content-based information retrievals and a load balancing technology. The proposed distributed query manager embeds the high-level semantic relationships among the multimedia

more »

... data objects into the k-NN based similarity search, thus bridging the semantic gap and increasing the relevance of query results manifold. This research has two major usabilities. First, it models a web environment where each node of the Grid can be considered as the nodes or sources of data in the world-wide-web. This should help to investigate and understand the challenges and requirements of future search paradigms based on content of multimedia data rather than on text annotations, as used currently. Second, it provides the foundation to develop content-based information retrievals as a possible Grid service. Extensive experiments were conducted with varied data sizes and different number of distribution nodes. Encouraging results are obtained that makes this endeavor a potential architecture to manage complex multimedia data over a distributed environment.