A visual approach to multimedia querying and presentation

Multimedia data has become readily available from a variety of resources, such as the Web, to users (ranging from naive to sophisticated) who need to select and to present the data in a way that is meaningful to their particular applications. Delaunay”” is our framework for querying and presenting multimedia data stored in distributed data repositories, including the Web. It is unique in combining user-defined layouts with ad hoc querying capabilities, thereby enabling users to tailor, in a simple way, the layout of virtual documents composed of retrieved mdimedia objects. In this paper, we focus on the object-oriented data models, on the declarative query languages, and on how the results of the queries to disparate resources are integrated to form coherent user-defined documents.