| | Multimedia Research Group : Microcosm (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13) |
 | | In its basic form, the architecture of Microcosm permits three levels of access to multimedia information, namely - browsing (hypermedia link serivce), unstructured (such as information retrieval) and structured (such as the hierarchical catalogue structure in the document management system). |
 | | The consequences of these design principles were the need to develop a link management system and a method of allowing links to be applied to applications that are not under the control of the hypermedia system, such as other authoring tools, database management systems, word processors and graphics packages. |
 | | We have ended up building much more than just another hypermedia system, in fact the core of Microcosm is really a set of communication protocols that enable the integration of all types of information processing tools, including a hypermedia link service. |
| www.mmrg.ecs.soton.ac.uk /projects/microcosm.html (2335 words) |