Kaplan has set himself an ambitious goal. He makes the point that most multimedia applications present multimedia information to the user in severely restricted ways. He argues that artificial intelligence tools could serve to change this situation. He offers his text as a handbook for developers, claiming that it includes an overview of multimedia applications, an overview of intelligent systems technology, and a significant example that marries the two. The example is a tutorial on fixing toasters.

I enjoyed reading the individual chapters of the book. Kaplan appears to know the topics, and he writes well. However, the book falls short of its goal. The selection of topics is idiosyncratic, with serious omissions if the aim is real applications. Kaplan claims that the book is not intended as an instruction book on any of the tools, but he spends considerable time on each one: a graphics package called IL, Authorware, and Visual Basic for multimedia. On the artificial intelligence side, he introduces LISP, Prolog, expert systems, and frames, with a chapter at the end on grammars for natural language processing. He does not mention object-oriented analysis and programming, the extension of entity-relationship modeling to multimedia, or geometric modeling. I believe these are the relevant technologies for multimedia applications. The main example--the toaster repair tutorial--does not marry the preceding topics in the text. The smaller examples in the individual chapters are not in themselves compelling. A CD containing copies of some of the examples is supplied with the text. I did not continue testing this after failing to make the Visual Basic ATM machine simulation work.

The text begins with an introduction. Chapter 2, “Multimedia Authoring Tools,” describes IL, Authorware, and Visual Basic for simulations. Chapter 3, “The Multimedia Database,” focuses on connecting media to devices. An exposition on Visual Basic, using the example of an ATM simulation, includes many subroutines, but pays little attention to properties of objects and event handling. Chapter 4, “Tools for Intelligent Applications,” contains a brief Lisp tutorial, a brief Prolog tutorial, and an expert systems example on toasters. There are small mistakes in the examples, which is not uncommon but made following the logic difficult. Chapter 5, “Knowledge Representation,” discusses semantic networks and frames. Chapter 6, “Models,” focuses on rule-based systems. Chapter 7 is “A Toaster Tutorial”; the author has paid some attention to what a tutorial should do.

Chapter 8, “Natural Language Processing and Intelligent Multimedia,” contains two examples, one on Automatic Illustration and one on foreign language instruction. Automatic Illustration looks as though it might be a more substantive use of multimedia than the toaster tutorial, but the discussion is brief and focuses on mechanics, such as pull-down menus. The last chapter, “The Future of Intelligent Multimedia,” discusses neural nets, using the Towers of Hanoi as the illustration; genetic programming; virtual reality; and the Internet.