Adlet: An active document abstraction for multimedia information fusion

A new approach is described for the fusion of multimedia information based on the concept of active documents advertising on the Internet, whereby the metadata of a document travels in the network to seek out documents of int erest to the parent document and, at the same time, advertises its parent d ocument to other interested documents. This abstraction of metadata is call ed an adlet, which is the core of our approach. Two important features make this approach applicable to multimedia information fusion, information ret rieval, data mining, geographic information systems, and medical informatio n systems: 1) any document, including a web page, database record, video fi le, audio file, image and even paper documents, can be enhanced by an adlet and become an active document, and 2) any node in a nonactive network can be enhanced by adlet-savvy software and the adlet-enhanced node can coexist with other nonenhanced nodes. An experimental prototype provides a testbed for feasibility studies in a hybrid active network environment.