The nature of information has changed significantly in the last two decades. Now information is multimedia, sensitive to its spatio-temporal roots, live, and dynamic. Current database and search technology is very limited in addressing organization, management, and access of emerging information systems. In this paper, we address some of the fundamental issues that must be addressed in general multimedia information management systems. We present multimedia electronic chronicles (e-chronicles) as an example of emerging systems that need such technology. We believe that to deal with dynamic information, events should be used as the fundamental basis in organizing and accessing information. Event models used in our approach capture the semantics involved in supporting e-chronicles. Our ideas are demonstrated in the context of an e-chronicle that is being implemented for a reconnaissance application using multiple disparate sensors.
Westermann et al. (Sat,) studied this question.