The management of the vast amount of media assets captured at every day events such as meetings, birthday parties, vacation, and conferences has become an increasingly challenging problem. Today, most media management applications are media-centric. This means, they put the captured media assets into the center of the management. However, in recent years it has been proposed that events are a much better abstraction of human experience and thus provide a more appropriate means for managing media assets. Consequently, approaches that include events into their media management solution have been explored. However, they typically consider events only as some more metadata that can be extracted from the media assets. In addition, today's applications and approaches concentrate on particular problems such as event detection, tagging, sharing, classification, or clustering and are often focused on a single media type. In this paper, we argue for the benefits of an event-centric media management (EMMa) approach that looks at the problem of media management holistically. Based on a generic event model, we specify a media event model for the EMMa approach. The single phases and processes of the EMMa approach are defined in a general process chain for an event-centric media management, the EMMa cycle. This cycle follows the event concept throughout all phases and processes of the chain and puts the concept of events in the center of the media management. Based on the media event model and EMMa cycle, we design a component-based architecture for the EMMa approach and conduct an implementation of the approach.

We demonstrate the concept of event-centric multimedia data management in the context of a multimedia eChronicle for the analysis, exploration, and reporting of events in military reconnaissance missions. Unlike the traditional media-centric approach, event-centric multimedia data management focuses on the management of real-world events; documenting media are regarded as event metadata. For the detection of mission events, we apply simple but robust spatio-temporal clustering of basic soldier state and media events with good results considering the uncontrolled environment a military patrol constitutes. The core of the architecture is generic and applicable for the event-centric management of multimedia data in other domains as well.