Hypermapped Virtual World Metaphor: To support visual querying, we can integrate the user's view of the information spaces with the underlying semantic model such as the InfoSleuth's ontology model. The Hypermapped Virtual World model is quite compatible with the ontology model to form an integrated model with four or five layers.

Criteria for Evaluation:
For content-based access of multimedia, can relevant associations be easily discovered? Can new associations be easily created, encoded and maintained?
Multilingual Interfaces:
Although visual interfaces are supposedly "universal", the meanings of visual symbols (icons) do shift across cultural boundaries. A solution is to provide multilingual interfaces so that the user can shift to the user's native language in an interactive session.