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 becomeoverwhelming. This confronts information workers with two majorproblems: finding the information needed, and accessing it; they arecalled the search problem and the access problem, respectively. Asthe main result of our research an architecture is specified of anautomated tool that provides integrated support for searching andaccessing multimedia documents that may be located at arbitraryplaces. The architecture contains a database with information aboutthe documents and with thesaurus-like information. The architecturealso contains a browse mechanism and a query mechanism for inspectingthe database. In the design process of the architecture, severalfundamental questions arose, like “What is a document?”and “ What is a medium kind?”. The developed answers tosome of these questions are considered to have a general characterand thus to be useful also outside the scope of the research at hand.The paper concludes with an overview of the current status of theproject and a discussion of future work.