The MAVIS Microcosm Extensions for Content Based Navigation and Retrieval

Over the last five years the Multimedia Systems Group at Southampton University has been developing an open hypermedia system called Microcosm [Fountain 90][Davis 92][Hill 93][Wilkins 93]. This system is a valuable tool for hypermedia research and also a versatile open hypermedia environment in which all documents are left in their native formats and all link information is held separately [Heath 92]. It is common knowledge that link authoring within a hypermedia application is an arduous and time consuming task. Authoring every link by hand soon ceases to be feasible. Microcosm provides two powerful alternatives to the manual creation of every link. These are the generic link (providing a tool for CBN) [Fountain 90] and the computed link (providing a tool for CBR)[Davis 92].