An important research issue with multimedia databases is the formulation of queries to the database. Here the search for structured multimedia documents or relevant parts of it gains more and more significance. Unfortunately text retrieval on its own is not sufficient for the realization of capable search services in this respect. Therefore, an efficient combination of automatic text retrieval, retrieval in meta data and content based retrieval on structured multimedia documents is needed.
In the present paper we propose POQLMM as a general purpose query language for an object oriented multimedia database, which supports the combination of text retrieval, content-based retrieval for other media types and traditional fact retrieval on structured multimedia documents. To this end, we describe the significant features of POQLMM and point out the applicability of POQLMM by means of some query examples.