Information objects encapsulating multimedia and intelligence

Due to the popularity of the consumer electronics, the digital data are largely generated every day. With a large quantity of the digital data, there is no well designed method for data arrangement and categorization. Using the search engines is preferable to deal with the huge amount of data. However, in this way, the data act like "Passive Contents" which waits the search engine to index them and query them. There is no effective way to make the "Passsive Contents" portable. The extensibility and reusability of the contents are poor too. The "Passive Contents" can only be search and displayed. They can't be used for later data syndication or integration. For example, data update and modification are impossible unless the "Passive Contents" are recognized by using copy/paste or parsing. In order to solve this problem, we make use of the characteristics of Object Oriented Design. We pack the data which contain long-term effective information into an object package which is called "Information Object" (InfO). The InfO is an "Active Contents which contains data and methods. It is a meaningful object for long-term usage which has the following characteristics: self-containedness, portability, extensibility, and reusability. In this paper, we will present how to the concept of InfO and how to design the system architecture to support long-term and reusable data storing. The InfO which contains multimedia and smart functions is self-contained and portable to be used under the current web environment.