ARHON: A Multimedia Database Design for Image Documents

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and initial implementation of a multimedia system for historical documents. The system, currently under development at FORTH, will be used by the Vikelea Municipal Library of archives at Heraklion, Crete. The material consists of historical documents that need to be digitized, indexed and continuously annotated by scholars so that the value of the archive will increase by its use. We present the design architecture and initial implementation of a clientserver model for the creation, maintenance and use of such a digital archive. Also, we present a technique for marking-up different media to provide rapid entering of semantic information The user can interactively markup parts of the representation on the medium of choice (e.g. areas on a document image) and associate local information with text, images, sound-clips, video or subparts of them without altering the original. The output is XML files that can be parsed by viewers to navigate through the s..