A Flexible Architecture for Content and Concept Based Multimedia Information Exploration

Traditional hypermedia systems can be extended to allow content based matching to give more flexibility for user navigation, but this approach is still limited by the capabilities of multimedia matching technology. The addition of a multimedia thesaurus can overcome some of these limitations by allowing multimedia representations of concepts to act like synonyms in the query process. In addition, relationships between concepts allow navigation within the context of a semantic scope. The use of agents that independently examine the information in the system can also provide alternative methods for query evaluation. This paper presents a flexible architecture that supports such a system and describes initial work on implementation.