Automatic Generation of User-Defined Virtual Documents Using Query and Layout Templates

DelaunayMM is an authoring, querying, and visualization framework for multimedia information retrieved from distributed repositories including the Web. Users compose virtual documents by specifying visually templates that contain both layout information and query specification. The query engine generates a set of similarly laid out pages for each template, whose number depends both on the number of retrieved objects that satisfy the queries and on the layout specification. In this paper we focus on the object-oriented data models, on the declarative query languages, and on the automatic generation of the virtual documents. Our framework distinguishes itself from others in that it combines presentation with querying, in particular by allowing for the customization of the layout by users and for the retrieval of the distributed information using database object-oriented technology. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.