The ARCHIMEDES Network System: A system for searching and accessing information in multiple multimedia sources

The amount of information available to information workers recently has become overwhelming. This confronts information workers with two major problems: finding the information needed, and accessing it; they are called the search problem and the access problem, respectively. As the main result of our research an architecture is specified of an automated tool that provides integrated support for searching and accessing multimedia documents that may be located at arbitrary places. The architecture contains a database with information about the documents and with thesaurus-like information. The architecture also contains a browse mechanism and a query mechanism for inspecting the database. In the design process of the architecture, several fundamental questions arose, like "What is a document?" and "What is a medium kind?". The developed answers to some of these questions are considered to have a general character and thus to be useful also outside the scope of the research at hand. The paper concludes with an overview of the current status of the project and a discussion of future work.