Abstract

This paper discusses aspects of multimedia document bases and how access to documents held on a computer-based system can be achieved; in particular the current access methods of hypermedia and free text information retrieval are discussed. Browsing-based hypermedia systems provide ease of use for novice users and equal access to any media; however, they typically perform poorly with very large document bases. In contrast query-based free text retrieval systems are, typically, designed to work with very large document bases, but have very poor multimedia capabilities. This paper then presents a hybrid between these two traditional fields of information retrieval together with a technique for using contextual information to provide access, through query, to documents which cannot be accessed by content (e.g. images). Two experiments are then presented which were carried out to test this approach. Finally, the paper gives a brief discussion of a prototype implementation, which provides access to mixed media information by query or browsing, and user-interface issues are discussed. * A version of this paper was presented at the RIAO91 conference in Barcelona (Dunlop and Van Rijsbergen 1991). This paper completely supersedes the conference paper in the development and testing of the model, however, the conference paper gives more details on the prototype application and wider issues described at the end of this paper. + May be reached by e-mail to mark@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk. HYPERMEDIA & FREE TEXT RETRIEVAL 2

Citations