A visual approach to querying and presenting multimedia data

Recent years have seen a shift in the types of information available for querying as well as the location of that information. This is largely traceable to the introduction of the World-Wide Web and subsequent availability of digital libraries accessible from the Web. Users ranging from naive to sophisticated now have a wealth of multimedia data at their fingertips. Unfortunately, it is often no easy task to navigate through that data and extract what is pertinent to a particular application. Once the sought-after information is found, presenting it is complicated by the fact that multimedia data does not conform to a pre-defined style.;Our research has been targeted at determining if there is a way to combine querying with layout so that users can easily define both the information they seek and how to present it. Delaunay;Contributions of our work include a thorough overview of current research in the areas of multimedia authoring and querying, our use of user-defined style sheets for defining the page layout of multimedia objects, the concept of nesting query boxes to define page content as well as linkages between the objects in those pages, the ability to combine data from multiple repositories into one document, and the generation of sophisticated presentations of potentially large sets of multimedia objects based on user specifications. Extensions to the use of style sheets for defining alternative data formats and to Web query languages for defining document composition provide motivations for further research in these areas.;Also included here is a description of our Delaunay...