ylfink@water.UUCP (ylfink) (01/13/86)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
OFFICE AUTOMATION AND DATA BASES COLLOQUIUM
- Wednesday, January 15, 1986.
Prof. S. Christodoulakis of this department will speak
on ``Issues in the Architecture of a Multimedia Infor-
mation System''.
TIME: 3:30 PM
ROOM: MC 5158
ABSTRACT
Data Base Management Systems have been very successful
in the commercial world for application environments
which use formatted data. Many important application
environments emerge however, which require unformatted
data such as text, images and voice. Data base manage-
ment systems that deal successfully with unformatted
data have to be developed.
In the first part of this talk we demonstrate a video
of MINOS, a multimedia information system for an office
environment which we developed (with the participation
of several students) at the University of Toronto. The
system runs on a standalone, SUN-2, V1, workstation
running Unix. Attributes, text, and images are stored
on a magnetic disk. Voice is stored on a separate,
directly addressable, analogue device (Instavox). The
user interfaces of the system utilize the high resolu-
tion bit map displays of the SUN-2 workstation, the SUN
window manager, and a mouse pointing device.
In the second part of the talk we outline some features
of a more general multimedia data base management sys-
tem. We regard voice as an important means of communi-
cation. Symmetric capabilities for text and voice
browsing should be provided by the presentation
manager. Some of the functions of such a system should
be centralized within an organization. We pinpoint
some other issues of importance in the architecture of
such a distributed multimedia object server.
A SUN-3 workstation has arrived and will be soon
delivered to the University of Waterloo. We plan to
use it for the development of such a multimedia infor-
mation system.