This paper presents a scaleable and extendable architecture consisting of the essential building blocks for multimedia information services. It provides building blocks for multimedia transport, storage, retrieval, filtering, and presentation, together with their interdependencies. After presenting the overall architecture, we focus in more detail on the 3-level modeling and querying of multimedia data. Emphasis is placed on the support for a wide variety of modeling and querying techniques in the context of a coherent architecture. The description of the architecture is followed by a description of a possible implementation of the architecture focussing on specific modeling and querying techniques. Finally, the use of the architectural components in a number of example multimedia information retrieval services is shown.
