A system facilitates the searching and retrieval of multimedia data items. The system receives data items from different types of media sources and identifies regions in the data items. The regions include document regions, section regions, and passage regions. Each of the section regions corresponds to one of the document regions and each of the passage regions corresponds to one of the section regions and one of the document regions. The system stores document identifiers that relate to the document regions in separate document records in a document table, section identifiers that relate to the section regions in separate section records in a section table, and passage identifiers that relate to the passage regions in separate passage records in a passage table.