A user interface for distributed multimedia database querying with mediator supported refinement

The Delaunay/sup MM/ system supports an interactive, customizable interface for querying multimedia distributed databases, such as digital libraries. Through this interface, users select virtual document styles that cater the display of query results to their needs, while also offering transparent preand post-query refinement and querying. Delaunay/sup MM/'s virtual documents preserve context by maintaining a single customizable interface for result viewing. The advanced transparent query features rely on mediation to provide adept access to information. In this paper, we present the framework for Delaunay/sup MM/, its architecture, the user interface, and results of the first usability study.