OMNIS/Myriad on its Way to a Full Hypermedia Information System

The novel information retrieval system OMNIS is supported by the fulltext database system Myriad, and provides archiving, disclosing, and searching functions at drastically reduced costs. The user interface of OMNIS has been created in an intuitive way and compared with the Dexter Hypertext Reference Model, two main differences will be noticed: On the one hand, OMNIS does not support arbitrary hypermedia data types but only documents consisting of text and optionally PostScript and/or images. Especially links between documents are missing. That means, OMNIS does not satisfy all criteria for being a hypermedia system. On the other hand, OMNIS offers a powerful, user-friendly fulltext query language, which the Dexter Model does not require, and it provides a much more comfortable query interface than pure hypermedia systems. The paper will show that OMNIS can integrate other hypermedia data types like audio data, image sequences, etc. and especially links. The fulltext query language, however, is a popular and powerful tool. The combination of hypertext and a declarative query language is possible and the advantages of both paradigms can here be preserved. The result is a full hypermedia information system, which can be used as electronic hypermedia library and also as basis for tutoring systems and cooperative hypermedia systems.