The Object-oriented Development of Multimedia Information Systems

As object-oriented analysis and design techniques become more mature, the promises of object-orientation become more realizable. The advent of multimedia hardware and software technology give rise to a need for generalized multimedia data access methods. This chapter discusses the advantages of using object-oriented analysis and design techniques to design and develop a general client-server architecture for browsing, retrieving, and analyzing distributed multimedia data. The object-oriented development techniques are illustrated in the description of enforms, an object-oriented distributed multimedia information system developed at Michigan State University.