SIMOS: Supporting interactive multimedia on-line services

Contract Information

Programme:	FOURTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME
Programme Acronym:	ESPRIT 4
Contract Type:	PREPARATORY, ACCOMPANYING AND SUPPORT MEASURES
Start Date:	1996-06-01
End Date:	1999-05-31
Contract No:	20979
Role for TUC/MUSIC:	Contractor
Funding for TUC/MUSIC:	20000.0 Euros
Principal Investigator for TUC/MUSIC:	Stavros Christodoulakis

Project Information

Project Web Site

Project Official Web Site

Project Description

At the present and at least for the near future certain multimedia information services will still be distributed on physical media. However, centralized services accessed over a network are now gaining rapidly in popularity and diffusion. Such services have certain clear advantages. They are available on demand, offer an indefinitely large subject domain, and are continuously updated. They also enable users to access transaction-services and products can be viewed, evaluated, and purchased immediately.

Technologies for storing, organizing, searching, and presenting multimedia data for use in multimedia applications, as well as design methodologies for the easy and cost-effective development of multimedia applications are still in their infancy. Furthermore, at the moment, these technologies are far from being integrated and standardised. This lack of integration and standardisation has a number of negative implications. First of all, the development of the different components of a multimedia interactive on-line service means that it is necessary to use packages, devices and tools that do not have simple common interfaces; the burden of putting the various constituents together is thus left completely to the application programmer, who must explicitly configure the different modules and implement their common interaction and communication features. Secondly, both the resulting product and the individual components have a very low degree of portability and reuse. Thirdly, different but semantically interrelated on-line services have a low degree of interoperability, i.e., it is difficult for them to be easily integrated in a common environment. Finally, very often the attention and efforts of application developers and producers tend to focus on "low level" problems, rather than on addressing the new requirements and the problems of usability that on-line interactive multimedia may induce in end users of electronic services.

Project Publications

Project Downloads

Project Consortium

	CNR-IEI Consiglio Nationale delle Ricerche - Instituto di Elaborazione della Informazione	ΙΤ
	Alcatel-Aar Alcatel-Aar	FR
	BIFOA BIFOA	DE
	CWI Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica	NL
	GMD - IPSI GMD - IPSI	ΙΤ
	Olivetti Olivetti S.p.A	ΙΤ
	TU Wien Vienna University of Technology	AU
	PM POLITECNICO DI MILANO	ΙΤ
	N/A UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI LECCE	ΙΤ
	N/A INTRACOM S.A.	EL