Designing hypermedia information retrieval systems for multimedia art catalogues

Multimedia art catalogues present a number of recurring characteristics in both the type of data and the users involved, and in the type of operations required. Typical data include textual catalogue cards manageable through an information retrieval system (IRS), as well as textual captions, images, video, and speech, organizable as a hypermedia network. In this paper we propose a model for the design of these applications, and discuss its effectiveness in improving the quality of the application. The model exploits a multi-level design approach to organize data and access structures of the IRS, while the Entity-Relationship (E-R) approach, tailored to model hypermedia applications, is adopted to describe the structure of the documents and their links.