On November 1, 2002, Dr. Theodore Williams will give a presentation on multimedia databases to the Mid Atlantic Association of Oracle Professionals (MAOP). Dr. Williams’ company, AIMSTAR, is a provider of database system and multimedia solutions.

Today's environment demands the collection of data for scientific, educational, governmental and commercial purposes. This data is often in different media forms such as text, audio, images, and video. One would like to be able to store, index, and retrieve these different media forms in a way similar to the management of traditional alphanumeric structured data. But, accurate indexing and retrieval of multimedia is much more difficult than with structured data. Tools are needed to extract meaningful metadata from the media and create indexes based on this metadata. The resulting indexes can then be used for content-based media retrieval.

The Mid Atlantic Association of Oracle Professionals (MAOP) was founded in 1992 and has more than 800 Oracle members, primarily in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. A not-for-profit organization, MAOP's mission is to provide educational and networking opportunities that will assist its members in the workplace.