Multimedia Modeling Towards Information Superhighway

The process of integrating multiple senses and media into computer systems accelerated recently. This has broaden the applications of multimedia from the traditional areas of information organization, presentation and learning, to the new fields of simulation and virtual reality. Applications that have benefited from the introduction of multimedia include: training, demonstration of products for sales or inventory, education, computer-aided design and engineering, medicine, weather, and entertainment.This volume is devoted to the discussion of effective modeling of multimedia information and systems for a wide range of applications. It is perhaps the only book that devotes entirely to this important but much neglected topic.

The purpose of the MMM series of conferences is to bring together activities related to all aspects of multimedia modeling, in its broader sense, from multimedia networking to virtual worlds. Its ultimate goal is to provide a better understanding of the basic paradigms and to establish conceptual links between them for better design of future advanced multimedia systems. The proceedings of MMM '96 present the state-of-the-art in the representation, processing, interaction, integration and retrieval of multimedia information.

The world is inherently complex and multimedia in nature. The development of computer systems to tackle real-world problems is an extremely difficult task. As computers capable of manipulating multimedia information are becoming more powerful and commonplace, larger and more complex systems are increasingly being built. To fully comprehend the complexity of such undertakings, proper modeling of multimedia information and systems must be carried out.A model provides a high-level abstraction of the system in which the implementation is based upon. It permits the desirable properties of the system to be extracted and analyzed and also provides a uniform framework for integration between different systems, and for interactions between the system and human users.This volume is devoted to the discussion of effective modeling of multimedia information and systems for a wide range of applications. It aims to provide common modeling frameworks for the integration of the diverse subjects in the field of multimedia information.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the EP'98 and RIDT'98 conferences, held jointly during the Second International Week on Electronic Publishing and Typography in St. Malo, France, in March/April 1998. The 43 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics covered are artistic imaging, tools and methods in typography, non-latin type, typographic creation, imaging, character recognition, handwriting models, legibility and design issues, fonts and design, time and multimedia, electronic and paper documents, document engineering, documents and linguistics, document reuse, hypertext and the Web, and hypertext creation and management.

The Web is the nervous system of information society. As such, it has a pervasive influence on our daily lives. And yet, in some ways the Web does not have a high MIQ (Machine IQ). What can be done to enhance it? This is the leitmotif of "Intelligent Exploration of the Web," (lEW)--a collection of articles co-edited by Drs. Szczepaniak, Segovia, Kacprzyk and, to a small degree, myself. The articles that comprise lEW address many basic problems ranging from structure analysis of Internet documents and Web dialogue management to intelligent Web agents for extraction of information, and bootstrapping an ontology-based information extraction system. Among the basic problems, one that stands out in importance is the problem of search. Existing search engines have many remarkable capabilities. But what is not among them is the deduction capability--the capability to answer a query by drawing on information which resides in various parts of the knowledge base. An example of a query might be "How many Ph.D. degrees in computer science were granted by European universities in 1996?" No existing search engine is capable of dealing with queries of comparable or even much lower complexity. Basically, what we would like to do is to add deduction capability to a search engine, with the aim of transforming it into a question-answering system, or a QI A system, for short. This is a problem that is of major importance and a challenge that is hard to meet.