Retrieval of volatile database output through hypermedia applications

This paper reports on research on the generation of hypermedia (Web) applications for querying multimedia databases. We have proposed a heuristic algorithm for generating navigational structures for multimedia database output, based on ideas from RMM. Here we discuss two extensions to our approach. The first extension concerns in more depth the generation of navigation for volatile database output. The semantics of the data are used to produce a navigational structure for the hypermedia presentation, while by adding elements to the query syntax we allow the user to influence this. The second extension deals with the automatic generation of a presentation for the multimedia database output. While many of the presentation issues can be settled at design time by the designer of the application, a number of issues should be tackled at query time. These issues concern the presentation of records and their relationships with other records.