1. A system for the automatic capturing of hyperlink specifications for multimedia documents comprising: SGML converters for receiving textual documents and for providing SGML documents; AIU extractors for receiving non-textual documents and for providing AIU documents; an automatic hyperlinker connected to said SGML converters and said AIU extractors; a link editor connected to said automatic hyperlinker; and a link manager connected to said automatic hyperlinker; wherein said link editor provides mechanisms for transforming context and content of links indicated by authors into more general link rules that when executed can automatically generate syntactically similar links.