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HIFI (ESPRIT Project 6532) creates a set of tools to allow a reader to access a large body of heterogeneous information, managed by external databases created beforehand, through a hypertext interface. Information currently found in information systems is based on different media and is usually managed by different tools, like relational databases and a variety of multimedia database systems. Sometimes the need arises to ‘browse’ through the information using an interactive and intuitive interface. Hypertext is probably the best current means for interactive (and possibly intuitive) navigation through a heterogeneous body of information. Available hypertext tools, however, are usually seen as being for managing their own information rather than being an interface for accessing external databases. The HIFI approach is based on a model‐based description of the hypertext application, as it appears to the reader. A declarative and/or operational mapping translates hypertext operations (search, queries and navigation) into operations on the underlying information base and also ‘materialises’ hypertext objects, using objects of the underlying databases. The system also implements methodologies to support the hypertext interface development process. Real‐life applications will be developed to show the validity of the approach, with the cooperation of important end‐users who will cooperate with the project directly, either as partners or sponsors.

A multimedia computer system is one that can create, import, integrate, store, retrieve, edit, and delete two or more types of media materials in digital form, such as audio, image, full‐motion video, and text information. This paper surveys four possible types of multimedia computer systems: hypermedia, multimedia database, multimedia message, and virtual reality systems. The primary focus is on advanced multimedia systems development projects and theoretical efforts that suggest long‐term trends in this increasingly important area.

This paper aims to describe MoM-NOCS, a Framework and a System that support communities with common interests in nature to capture and share multimedia observations of nature objects or events using mobile devices.

The observations are automatically associated with contextual metadata that allow them to be visualized on top of 2D or 3D maps. The observations are managed by a multimedia management system, and annotated by the same and/or other users with common interests. Annotations made by the crowd support the knowledge distillation of the data and data provenance processes in the system.

MoM-NOCS is complementary and interoperable with systems that are managed by natural history museums like MMAT (Makris et al., 2013) and biodiversity metadata management systems like BIOCASE (BioCASE) and GBIF (GBIF) so that they can link to interesting observations in the system, and the statistics of the observations that they manage can be visualized by the software.

The Framework offers rich functionality for visualizing the observations made by the crowd as function of time.