Flexible querying in multimedia databases with an object query language

The objective of flexible querying is to provide users with new interrogation capabilities based on fuzzy criteria. The problem is no longer to decide if an element does or does not satisfy a Boolean condition, but rather to what extent it satisfies a fuzzy (or imprecise) condition. Expressing fuzzy conditions allows users to express preferences and to have ranked answers. In this paper we show that flexible querying is an essential tool to manipulate multimedia data and we describe a general framework which makes flexible querying suitable for multimedia databases.