Querying and Browsing Multimedia Presentations.

Querying and searching the Web is an important research field which has drawn a number of concepts from databases and information retrieval fields, but has added its own models, requirements and techniques. Multimedia information adds another dimension to the problem, when information is globally conveyed by different media which are archived and delivered separately, and must be coordinated and synchronized. In this paper we discuss some issues about information retrieval in synchronized multimedia presentations. We introduce a class of multimedia presentations made of independent and synchronized media, and discuss how retrieval requirements can be defined. Then we discuss the need of a model for retrieving and browsing multimedia data in a way capable of integrating atomic media objects in coherent presentations.