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(TRADE MARK). An Instavox, directly addressable, analog device is used to store voice segments.