Since today more and more complementary information is available in different electronic media there is an increasing demand
for the integration of traditional digital library systems and multime- dia systems. In this paper we present the OMNIS/2
system, which is an advanced meta system and enhances existing digital library systems or retrieval systems by additional
storing and indexing of user-defined multimedia documents, automatic and personal linking concepts, anno- tations, filtering
and personalization.The key concept of OMNIS/2 is that all of the above mentioned features are accomplished without chang-
ing the underlying documents. In our architecture existing digital library systems, which are established applications, serve
as a document stor- age layer, while OMNIS/2 forms the multimedia storage layer, linking layer and personalization layer.
This general approach ensures the inte- gration and transparent combination of different digital library systems. Thus with
OMNIS/2, even mere retrieval systems - and nowadays most digital library systems are mere retrieval systems - can be enriched
to interactive multimedia DL-systems and are combined into one virtual personal digital library. OMNIS/2 is part of the Global
Inventory Project of the G7 countries.
OMNIS/2 is funded by DFG (German Research Foundation) within the research initiative “V3D2” (“Distributed Processing and Delivery
of Digital Documents”)