Integration and Handling of Hypermedia Information as a Challenge for Multimedia and Federated Database Systems

In every aspect of today's professional and private life, information becomes the key to planning, decision making and cooperation. The current widely used databases have been developed for the storing and handling of business data of record and/or table format. Other types of data typically have to be stored in le systems of various complexities. Over the last ten years this deecit of databases has been recognized and new research/development eeorts for extended/novel database management systems have been started. Object-oriented, deductive, active, multimedia, and hypertext databases are only some of these systems. In this paper we will argue that multimedia database systems will be needed for the handling of today's and tomorrow's information. These data again can be seen under a hypermedia document paradigm. To support these document structures and their manipulation, extensible object-oriented databases are one of the most promising avenues currently explored. We shall illustrate how such an approach can be used at the "data"end to integrate distributed and heterogeneous multi-media information sources and at the "usage" end to provide a broad range of paradigms for domain speciic representation and handling mechanisms both in multiuser and cooperating user environments. This exibility will ultimately be needed to support aspects like ubiquitous or domesticated computing for the information age to come.