In this paper we have described the Microcosm open hypermedia system and MAVIS, an extension to Microcosm to allow content based navigation from non-text media as well as text. We have discussed the idea of a multimedia thesaurus(MMT) and shown how an MMT could be used to provide more powerful generic link authoring and following.
We are currently in the process of implementing the thesaurus, integrating it into the Microcosm/MAVIS architecture and developing intelligent agents to improve/automate the grouping of representations in the MMT and the matching of selections during link following. There is substantial scope for introducing further enhancements to content based navigation and retrieval facilities using the capabilities of the multimedia thesaurus.