Multimedia Information Systems Research Articles

Issues in the Design of a Distributed Testbed for Multimedia Information Systems (MINOS)

Abstract:Multimedia INfOrmation Systems (minos) manage largely unformatted data such as text, image, voice, attributes, and programs. This paper presents the motivation, the hardware tools, the important issues, and the problems involved in the design and implementation of a multimedia object server testbed. The testbed will allow us to study the impact of various design decisions and algorithms on system performance, the most successful of which will be integrated in the final implementation of distributed minos. The distributed architecture proposed is based on the client server model, where an optical disk-based subsystem serves as the archival component and where the presentation manager of the client subsystem includes handling of the internal structure, external logical organization, and browsing through multimedia objects.

Multimedia document presentation, information extraction, and document formation in MINOS: a model and a system

MINOS is an object-oriented multimedia information system that provides integrated facilities for creating and managing complex multimedia objects. In this paper the model for multimedia documents supported by MINOS and its implementation is described. Described in particular are functions provided in MINOS that exploit the capabilities of a modern workstation equipped with image and voice input-output devices to accomplish an active multimedia document presentation and browsing within documents. These functions are powerful enough to support a variety of office applications. Also described are functions provided for the extraction of information from multimedia documents that exist in a large repository of information (multimedia document archiver) and functions that select and transform this information. Facilities for information sharing among objects of the archiver are described; an interactive multimedia editor that is used for the extraction and interactive creation of new information is outlined; finally, a multimedia document formatter that is used to synthesize a new multimedia document from extracted and interactively generated information is presented. This prototype system runs on a SUN-3 workstation running UNIX'". An Instavox, directly addressable, analog device is used to store voice segments.

The multimedia object presentation manager of MINOS: a symmetric approach

Large multimedia data bases become feasible due to recent advances in hardware technology. A very important component of multimedia data base management systems will be the presentation manager which will be responsible for effective multimedia presentation and browsing on the screen of workstations. In this paper we present the functions provided for multimedia presentation and browsing in MINOS, a multimedia information system. The presentation and browsing capabilities provided make effective use of the capabilities of a modern workstation to increase the man-machine communication bandwidth. We regard voice as an important means of communication. Symmetric capabilities for text and voice browsing are provided.