The Continuous Media Web: a distributed multimedia information retrieval architecture extending the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, with its paradigms of surfing and searching for information, has become the predominant system for computer-based information retrieval. Media resources, however information-rich, only play a minor role in providing information to Web users. While bandwidth (or the lack thereof) may be an excuse for this situation, the lack of surfing and searching capabilities on media resources are the real issue. We present an architecture that extends the Web to media, enabling existing Web infrastructures to provide seamless search and hyperlink capabilities for time-continuous Web resources, with only minor extensions. This makes the Web a true distributed information system for multimedia data. The article provides an overview of the specifications that have been developed and submitted to the IETF for standardization. It also presents experimental results with prototype applications.