Multimedia systems and their interconnection over global information networks like that of the Internet have, due to recent advances in telecommunications and transfer of images of high quality, acquired an enormous interest and importance as they provide a whole new spectrum of communication possibilities. It is now very important to study the problem of building effective distributed and interactive multimedia systems and at the same time learn how to exploit and evaluate their impact in the development of our society at large.
The general objective of this project is to contribute to the development of these systems as well as to study the social impacts of a state-of- the-art prototype. More specifically, an interactive, distributed multimedia system will be developed, which will take advantage of recent advances in the areas of multimedia modelling and development, middleware platforms and coordination models, parallel and distributed software engineering, digital libraries, and networking techniques. This prototype will be tailored to the specific needs of cultural exploration; furthermore, it will be particularly suitable for areas such as education, training, cultural integration, tourism, and electronic commerce. Thus, the overall objective of this project is to set up a framework to support Electronic Roads, by means of developing cross-national links of them, and use them for cultural and historical exploration in several countries of the Euro-Med region. In other words, the general aim of the project is to offer a concrete contribution to the creation (and evaluation of its impact) of the Information Society in the Euro-Med region.
This general objective can be broken down to four more specific objectives that would together achieve the overall goal of the project as follows:
i. To study and develop a generic interactive distributed multimedia framework, which will take advantage of recent advances in a number of related areas such as: multimedia modelling and development, middleware platforms and coordination models, parallel and distributed software engineering, digital libraries, and networking techniques.
ii. To tailor the functionality of this framework so that it is suitable for cultural exploration across national and regional boundaries.
iii. To technologically build particular prototypes of these regional Electronic Roads.
iv. To deploy these systems in various studies of the social and educational impact of the Information Society in the Euro-Med region.
Under the first objective, the project will develop the basic infrastructure that is required for the implementation of a novel metaphor, namely that of “electronic roads”. The second objective of the project aims to develop this new metaphor for searching of information on the Internet and the WWW. This will allow users to explore information by dynamically selecting a journey that suits their own interests as they follow the road and discover new information that they judge useful. Furthermore, the underlying infrastructure will be trying to accommodate the user’s requests in the best possible way, taking into account the constraints imposed by the available hardware, software functionality, networking capabilities and traffic, etc. The third objective aims to adapt and connect together various such multimedia cultural systems that exist locally in the neighbouring countries of the participants to form transnational regional roads. Their cultural exploration would be transparent to the different communities of the region adapting to the different linguistic and cultural backgrounds of these communities. These systems will form the basis for various social studies to evaluate their significance in several contexts such as education, tourism and cultural integration. This fourth objective will thus also serve as the main form of evaluation of the project where the value of such systems of regional cultural roads in various aspects of the Information Society is studied. An "End Users Group" will be formed to assist in this part of the project.
The project’s outcomes, and more to the point, the generic interactive distributed multimedia framework, the user-level environment for cultural exploration across national and regional boundaries, and the prototypes that the partners will build, should be compared favourably with existing environments for presenting multimedia-based information for cultural, educational and other domains, using web-based technology and novel technologies.