Merging Multimedia Presentations and Semistructured Temporal Data: a Graph-based Model and its Application to Clinical Information

Semistructured data are data having some structure, that may be irregular or incomplete and does not necessarily conform to a fixed schema. Semistructured data often contain the description of histories of the considered real world. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is becoming a cross compatible and standardized means for representing semistructured clinical data. In the field of medical informatics, there are many ongoing activities concerning XML. In the field of multimedia database systems, the topic related to the integration of several media objects (with their temporal aspects) have been considered both for data modeling and querying issues and for modeling multimedia presentations. In this paper, we focus on the issue of providing physicians with the capability of representing in a seamless way both temporal aspects of multimedia semistructured data and their temporal presentation requirements.