In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a hypermedia system that has the following characteristics. First, being designed according to the Dexter hypertext reference model, it has a layered architecture and thus maintains commonality with other hypermedia systems based on the Dextermodel. Second, being designed based on the MHEG standard, it has data structures that are inherently suitable for data interchange and synchronization. Third, adopting the MIME protocol, it provides multimedia mail services. Finally, being built on top of an object-oriented DBMS, it makes it easy to represent Dexter and MHEG models and also provides efficient storage and search capabilities. The contribution of this paper is combining these characteristics to build an integrated hypermedia system reflecting reference architectures and international standard efforts.

This paper presents the design concept of the MEMORI, MHEG Engine for Multimedia information Object Retrieval and Interchange, which consists of three functional modules; the decoder, the object manager, and interpreter. Based on our modular design, the MEMORI has been implemented on the UNIX workstation. The menu-driven object generator has also been developed to generate the test objects conforming to the MHEG. Using the object generator, several multimedia/hypermedia test objects have been composed on the basis of presentation scenarios. The results show that the MEMORI correctly decodes, manages, and interprets the MHEG objects. The MEMORI can be utilized for the interactive multimedia server as well as the multimedia presentation system.