FACILITATING OBJECT-BASED NAVIGATION THROUGH MULTIMEDIA WEB DATABASES

Since Web pages contain multimedia information, navigation on the Web should be based on multiple media, rather than textual data alone. Thr ough content-oriented integration by associating media contents with t heir semantics, we can support more flexible navigation styles using c ombinations of media characteristics and textual semantic meanings. We have developed a hypermedia system that provides content-oriented int egration at the granularity of both Web documents and the objects cont ained in the Web documents. With this system, users can precisely and flexibly specify semantics and/or visual attributes of their specific interested Web document contents. The system then creates dynamic link s for the users to navigate the matching Web pages. This paper present s a content-oriented integration environment for multimedia Web docume nts and their navigation mechanisms. Real examples of navigations on t he Web are used to illustrate the operational flows in the system. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.