MPEG-7 is a promising metadata standard for the extensive description of multimedia content. The amount of MPEG-7 media descriptions available is continuously increasing and adequate database support for the management of larger numbers of such descriptions is gaining more and more importance. Since MPEG-7 media descriptions essentially are XML documents following media description schemes defined with an extension of XML Schema named MPEG-7 DDL, employing XML database solutions for their management is an idea that lies close at hand. It is the aim of the present thesis to explore this idea in detail. It develops an extensive set of requirements that should be met by any XML database solution employed for the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions. Against these requirements, it thoroughly examines 21 representative state-of-the-art XML database solutions: native XML database solutions as well as XML extensions of traditional database management systems -- commercial systems, research prototypes, as well as open source projects. The examination unveils considerable deficiencies of existing XML database solutions that seriously limit their suitability for the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions. One of the major problems is that the analyzed solutions largely ignore schema and type information that is available within media description schemes for the storage of MPEG-7 media descriptions. As a consequence, large amounts of complex non-textual data typically contained in MPEG-7 media descriptions, such as frequency spectrums, color distributions, and object motion vectors, are inadequately stored and represented as text hindering reasonable access to these data and their appropriate processing. Facing these problems, this thesis sets out to develop an XML database solution which suits the needs of the management of MPEG-7 media descriptions. In this regard, this thesis makes several important contributions

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