40 Years of Computing at Newcastle

Department Technical Report Series No. 574

A Unifying Theory for Content Self-awareness in Distributed Multimedia Publishing

M. Heather and B.N. Rossiter

University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1997.

Abstract

A distributed publishing system is like the pages of a book floating in the breeze: hypertext pulls these together with a non-linear thread but still leaves the pages like a book without an index. When the pages belong to multimedia documents, the indexing has not only to be dynamic but to cope also with the heterogeneous data structures. A survey of current research projects shows the need for unifying principles.

A formal abstract theory of indexing for multimedia objects leads to the concept of machine awareness, presented here in the context of constructive database models and drawing on the latest results using category theory. Geometric logic can provide a universal representation in mathematics of concepts such as objects, limits, adjunctions and Heyting implications, all needed to deal with closure over open document contexts in hypermedia.

Department Technical Report Series - 1997
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Technical Report Abstract No. 574, 30 June 1997