Work in this area has evolved from the development by the group of an open hypermedia system, Microcosm, which now forms the basis of a commercial product. We are currently concerned with the integration of hypermedia, database, and information retrieval technology in order to tackle the problems involved in providing easy access to very large multimedia databases and we are also experimenting with the use of novel interfaces such as speech and virtual reality to aid the user's interaction with large information spaces. The group is actively involved in the drive by the international hypertext community to establish protocols for the interoperabilty of open hypermedia systems. Distributed Information Management and Agent Technologies Work on open hypermedia systems led to the development of distributed hypermedia link services and information management environments. Fully distributed open hypermedia systems bring major problems of distributed information management, and current work is concerned with the design of frameworks for intelligent communicating agents to support information retrieval in a distributed information environment.
Related projects involve the development of agents to support various information management tasks.
This work requires the use of ATM networking technology to achieve high communication bandwidth between specialised multimedia servers and their clients. This activity has acquired a substantial and valuable testbed of equipment primarily for work on the new Internet Protocol, IPv6 and is conducting pioneering work in this area with sponsorship from major networking companies. Applicants looking to take on new research areas within this area are welcomed. We have extended our hypermedia information management architecture to provide a framework for experimentation in this area and are working on the development of a multimedia thesaurus and network of agents to support information retrieval in such an environment. Our work on audio includes the development of browsers and hypermedia linking for audio information,and access mechanisms for audio databases.