The START Multimedia Information System: Current Technology and Future Directions.
Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin, Sue Felshin · 2002
To address the problem of information overload in today's world, we have developed Start,anatural language question answering system that provides users with high-precision multimedia information access through the use of natural language annotations. To address the di#culty of accessing large amounts of heterogeneous data, we have developed Omnibase, which assists Start by integrating structured and semistructured Web databases into a single, uniformly structured "virtual database." Our ultimate goal is to develop a computer system that acts like a "smart reference librarian," and we believe we have laid a firm foundation for achieving our goal. This paper describes our current implemented system and discusses future research directions.