A Four Level Architecture for Hypermedia Database Management Systems

In this thesis the Hypermedia Database Management System (HyperD) Architecture for hypermedia database management systems and the classes needed to implement the architecture are described. The HyperD architecture allows to model the structure as well as the content of hypermedia data in a consistent, highly flexible, and object oriented manner. The HyperD architecture can be extended easily to accommodate new media types and is flexible enough to model domain specific information. This thesis also describes implementation issues regarding a prototypical implementation for images.

One focus of the work is to show that the concept of physical and logical data independence can be applied beneficially to hypermedia database management systems. The approach to physical data independence presented here takes the characteristics of multimedia data into account and allows a controlled reuse of multimedia objects. The approach to logical data independence presented in this thesis is highly flexible and allows a clean separation of application specific and general knowledge.

This thesis also shows how the HyperD architecture can be extended with the concept of Corresponding Information Content (CIC). CIC allows to model the amount and quality of the pieces of information in one media object in relationship to the pieces of information in another media object.