HYNODE: Hypermedia News On Demand

Contract Information

Programme:	FOURTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME
Programme Acronym:	ESPRIT 4
Contract Type:	COST-SHARING CONTRACTS
Start Date:	1996-06-01
End Date:	1998-11-30
Contract No:	N/A
Role for TUC/MUSIC:	Contractor
Funding for TUC/MUSIC:	150000.0 Euros
Principal Investigator for TUC/MUSIC:	Stavros Christodoulakis

Project Information

Project Description

The project addresses the ever-growing news delivery market, which is at present characterised by major restructuring worldwide. The changes taking place reflect the need for increasing specialisation in news content, and the drive towards dynamic access to news to allow fast reaction, flexible delivery, customised presentation structures and interactive access. These changes are both caused and enabled by the transformation in the delivery mode from paper to electronic format, and by the growing trend towards interactive services delivering news according to the needs of each end-user.

The two major goals of the project are to:

• Demonstrate and integrate the ability of advanced multimedia technology to improve flexibility, efficiency and quality in the domain of news-on-demand.
• Demonstrate and assess the market applicability/acceptability of the news-on-demand service through the involvement of real industry players.

The approach is based on adapting existing software modules to create an appropriate environment for the demonstration of a news-on-demand application. The project is concentrating on defining a news document structure, and on filtering mechanisms to support news delivery according to specific user needs. The application will make use of modules such as authoring tools, multimedia information servers, viewers and browsing tools.

Interaction between the various tools and the consistency of the various multimedia news fileservers will be based on a standardised document structure. The project will adopt emerging hypermedia document standards, primarily the MHEG standard, in order to derive this structure. Delivery over existing telecommunications and computing infrastructures will require support for HTML hypermedia documents. All management mechanisms required for meeting service-provider or end-user requirements will be based on information contained in the common document structure.

End-user interests will be categorised in terms of user profiles determined by user requirements. End-user interfaces will support the definition of these user profiles and the activation of filtering mechanisms at the news fileservers.

Field trials of the system will be carried out with news producers and consumers in two countries, Greece and Italy, to provide an effective demonstration in two different markets. The experience gained from these field trials will provide further insight into market needs and expectations, and into appropriate strategies for launching news-on-demand applications.

The HyNoDe consortium represents a wide range of stakeholders in the news-on-demand sector. The information providers participating in the project have a proven involvement in the professional news industry. They expect through their involvement in the project to become able to exploit the benefits of advanced multimedia technology to the full in changing current modes of news delivery to a fully electronic, customised, interactive and on-demand approach.

HyNode's end result will be a user-driven, operational news-on-demand application, tested and demonstrated both from the end-user's and the service-provider's point of view. It will be based on a standard document architecture and capable of delivering news via Internet service provider access channels.

Project Publications

Project Downloads

Project Consortium

	IBM.be INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES BELGIUM	BE
	N/A INTRACOM S.A.	EL
	TUD Technische Universität Darmstadt	DE
	ETNOTEAM ETNOTEAM	ΙΤ
	Imerissia Imerissia	EL
	MCRLab Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory	US
	RADIOCOR Agenzia di Informazione Radiocor	ΙΤ
	COSI COSI	ΙΤ