Audio information retrieval in HyperMedia environment

The central position of multimedia documents today's information society and the new instruments offered by digital technologies have promoted the creation of large multimedia databases. A typical sample of this is the AESS, "Archivio di Etnografia e Storia Sociale" (Archive of Ethnography and Social History) of the Lombardy Region.The application designed for the multimodal navigation of the AESS web site illustrates the properties and strengths of tools and methods we have developed for the management and consultation of multimedia ethnographical archives composed of text, images, audios (both songs and spoken documents), and videos.