We describe the architecture of a federated system designed to allow the integration of structured, relational, data together with unstructured multimedia data. Two characteristics of multimedia have special implications for such an architecture. First, multimedia objects can be very large. Second, most good tools for working with multimedia expect these objects to be stored as files within a file system. These characteristics suggest that moving multimedia objects out of the file system, or making multiple copies, or moving them unnecessarily around a network, will all be suboptimal solutions. With these characteristics in mind, we experiment with a system architecture for federation that allows multimedia assets to remain in place, while still providing some of the benefits of structured data management.