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Welcome to the Cottontail DB Wiki!

Cottontail DB is a column store for multimedia retrieval and multimedia analysis. It allows for boolean retrieval, traditionally supported by classical database systems, as well as vector-space retrieval in the form of nearest-neighbour search (NNS), as used in similarity search. Most importantly, however, Cottontail DB allows for a seamless combination of the two retrieval modes in a unified data and query model.

This Wiki is supposed to be a collection of all information surrounding Cottontail DB both for developers as well as end-users. Currently, not all relevant parts are covered. However, we're working on it :-) If some information is missing for you, please open an issue.

Credits

Cottontail DB is based on the ideas presented in the following papers:

• Ivan Giangreco and Heiko Schuldt (2016): ADAMpro: Database Support for Big Multimedia Retrieval. Datenbank-Spektrum. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13222-015-0209-y
• Ivan Giangreco (2018): Database support for large-scale multimedia retrieval. PhD Thesis. https://edoc.unibas.ch/64751/

Furthermore, the current release of Cottontail DB relies on the following libraries (big shoutout here):

• MapDB for internal data organization and storage.
• Lucene for text retrieval and text matching.
• gRPC for communication with the outside world.
• FastUtil for fast in-memory data structures.
• Clikt for the CLI functionality.
• Picnic for table rendering in the CLI.

Citation

We kindly ask you to refer to the following paper in publications mentioning or employing Cottontail DB:

Ralph Gasser, Luca Rossetto, Silvan Heller, Heiko Schuldt. Cottontail DB: An Open Source Database System for Multimedia Retrieval and Analysis. In Proceedings of 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2020), Seattle, USA, 2020

Link: https://doi.org/10.1145/3394171.3414538

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{10.1145/3394171.3414538,
    author = {Gasser, Ralph and Rossetto, Luca and Heller, Silvan and Schuldt, Heiko},
    title = {Cottontail DB: An Open Source Database System for Multimedia Retrieval and Analysis},
    year = {2020},
    isbn = {9781450379885},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    doi = {10.1145/3394171.3414538},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia},
    pages = {4465–4468},
    numpages = {4},
    keywords = {open source, multimedia retrieval, database, multimedia indexing, data management system},
    location = {Seattle, WA, USA},
    series = {MM '20}
}