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<abstract xmlns="http://eprints.org/ep2/data/2.0">In the actual cultural and technological situation acting a generic Information Retrieval sounds limiting. In the traditional practice of the IR, each kind of document research is related to search conditions through a textual language, while nowadays a wider criteria of Multimedia Information Retrieval must be considered, a criteria in which each digital document is treated and searched through lexical or metalinguistic elements, more suitable to its own nature. There will be a distinction between the general practice of Multimedia Information Retrieval, an IR method based on  textual information for textual document search, and a Visual Retrieval method, where documents are retrieved on the basis of visual data.</abstract>
