As multimedia technology matures, new tools and techniques are needed that allow durable, high-quality electronic publications to be created and shared among networked users. During the past three years, the Multimedia Kernel Systems group at CWI has studied approaches to authoring and presenting multimedia documents that allow information to be encoded once and then used in a variety of environments over the life-cycle of the document. This research is currently being continued in conjunction with European partners in three EC research programs: the Esprit-4 project CHAMELEON, the ACTS project SEMPER and the Telematics project STEM. The common thread in all these projects is the desire to support the development of multimedia presentations that rival the longevity of printed books while also supporting the immediacy of network-based information distribution. In addition, the group is a member of the Esprit SIMOS network on interactive multimedia.
The development of multimedia technology --- interfaces, input devices, display systems --- has out-paced the ability of many end users to effectively create and manage multimedia applications. As a result, the cost of building multimedia applications is prohibitively expensive, often because information cannot be easily reused or tailored to the needs of a particular group of users. Research at CWI into multimedia authoring and modelling has focused on studying ways of making information more accessible across a wide range of user systems while maintaining a structured interface for document authors.
In the CHAMELEON project (ESPRIT-4 project 20597), CWI's CMIFed authoring system is being used as the base technology for defining durable, professional-quality multimedia documents. As its name suggests, its principal goal is to provide an environment that allows documents to adapt to new environments quickly and easily, under control of the document's content owner. Together with commercial publishers, commercial content providers and a group of software and marketing companies in six countries, CWI's existing work will be expanded to meet the requirements of industrial users across Europe. The CMIFed prototype provides an author-once model, in which a single document model is defined that subsequently can be semi-automatically adapted for use on a wide range of user presentation platforms. The author-once model allows several particular target encodings (in a variety of industry-standard formats) to be generated from a single (internal) document model; this provides efficient porting between platforms and protects the significant investment required to produce a high-quality multimedia title (see illustration below). This approach also allows users to access information at different levels of detail/resolution (and at a different level of cost), allowing information access to be tailored to the needs and budget of the user. Together, these features allows the authoring investment to be capitalized over the widest possible user community.
In the SEMPER project (ACTS-0042), CWI's role is to provide basic security and multimedia technology to implement a test-bed secure electronic marketplace in Europe. This project combines research efforts within Multimedia Kernel Systems with those of the Cryptology group also in the department AA. The objective of this 9-million-ECU (approximately 18 million HFL) project, which involves some 30 scientists from various disciplines, is to establish the security of fundamental commercial transactions over public information networks such as the Internet. Early trials will be performed on WWW, and subsequent test runs on ATM-based broadband networks will demonstrate the broad applicability of SEMPER's architecture and services. Along with the definition of basic security architecture issues, CWI will be involved in support high-bandwidth tests over ATM networks using documents created by our own CMIFed authoring environment and documents created by other commercial and research prototype systems. This work builds on CWI's existing experience with Internet networking, which started more than 10 years ago when CWI served as the central European networking hub in the world-wide exchange of electronic information.
The multimedia authoring and information management experience built at CWI during the past three years will also be used within a one-year demonstrator project STEM: Sustainable Telematics for Environmental Management (CEC Telematics project 1978). The goal of this work is to conduct a one-year feasibility study for supporting telematics-based environmental management in remote and ecologically-sensitive regions of Europe. This project, which joins researchers from six institutions in four countries, will use CWI's CMIFed environment to give land managers access to information relevant to the process of sound exploitation of natural resources. The initial target group of users will be a community of small farmers in northwest Scotland and a group of forest managers in Valencia, Spain. CWI will contribute our authoring expertise and define a broad state-of-the-art survey that will form the technological core of the project.
All of these projects share a common thread of integrating complex information that has a lifetime longer than a single user application. Our research into developing data models, authoring systems and run-time support for heterogeneous playback environments across variable-bandwidth computer networks has provided a foundation for investigating a wide range of multimedia applications. Our future work will build on our CMIFed prototype (developed using the Python prototyping language created at CWI) and the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model, which has generated a considerable amount of international interest. In particular, we continue to study high-level data models and low-level system support for presenting high-quality documents in heterogeneous production environments.
Dr. D.C.A. Bulterman
Multimedia Kernels Systems
Department of Algorithms and Architecture
Telefoon: 020 - 592 41 47
Email: Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica
Kruislaan 413
postbus 94079, 1090 GB Amsterdam
telefoon: 020 - 592 93 33
telefax: 020 - 592 41 99
september 1995