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In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front- and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers. INSET: Emergency Management in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an innovative system for traffic management that is under installation in the city of Valencia, Spain. This new traffic-management system is based on streaming video techniques over a high-speed Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol corporate network. The video-streaming application is a multicomponent distributed application whose main task is managing the distribution of video streams from the video servers to the service processes that execute at the final application servers in the traffic management center (TMC). A tree connecting the three Gigabit Ethernet switches and the L3 switch at the TMC was the core network topology. Since it uses multicast communication, the Video Stream Management Server allows the introduction of several applications and services.

This article presents a case study which explores the relationship between the writing and reading behavior of online students and the association of active participation with learning efficiency. In general, according to educational technology professor Diana Laurillard, e-learning outcomes could be greatly improved if higher-education teachers achieved three goals: developed better ways of searching for information, shared ideas and resources among learners, and improved and practiced communication techniques. The case study was designed on the basis of what is known about interaction and learning and or earlier research on lurking. The project stands on three pillars: interaction, visualization, and communication. In conclusion, a higher degree of visible interactions is not a precondition for higher learning efficiency. INSET: Previous Work.

The article presents two multimedia system installations that were designed to provide information to museum and exhibit visitors through natural-interaction interfaces. The Media Integration and Communication Center at the University of Florence used natural-interaction, computer vision systems for both the Point At system in the Museum of Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, Italy and the Interactive Blackboard system at the New City Exhibition of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The ultimate goal of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi was to use information technology to make teaching attractive and effective. The Point At system's goal is to stimulate the visitors to interact with a digital version of the fresco "The Journey of the Magi," by Benozzo Gozzoli and, at the same time, make them interact in the same way they will in the chapel, reinforcing their real experience with the fresco. The Interactive Blackboard at the Palazzo Vecchio consisted of a large rear-projected screen which displayed a colorful three-dimensional map of Florence. INSET: Editor's Note.

This article proposes a system that uses the a priori knowledge and experiences of the communicating parties and a combination of real-time and multimedia data without demanding excessive bandwidth. The receiving terminal combines the received data with the stored data based on the control signals received from the transmitting terminal, parameter set by the receiving party, and information in the personal information management database at the receiver. By using combinations of real-time and stored data and coordinating the seamless display of various media, the system provides the communicating parties with a rich communication experience. Because the system expends no transmission bandwidth for the media stored in the receiving terminal, it provides this experience without consuming excessive bandwidth. The proposed system lets the communicating parties control how the system multiplexes and transmits different types of media information between terminals and how the receiving terminals present the information. The controls could be related to the amount or kinds of information, the information source and the information quality they transmit or receive. Users can base the controls on their relationships with other communicating parties, past experience or knowledge shared between them, service options related to quality and communication costs and the communication scenario.

This article examines the life cycle of multimedia metadata. During its lifetime, multimedia content undergoes different stages or cycles from production to consumption. Content is created, processed or modified in a postproduction stage, delivered to users, and finally, consumed. Metadata, or descriptive data about the multimedia content, pass through similar stages but with different time lines. Metadata may be produced, modified, and consumed by all actors involved in the content production-consumption chain. At each step of the chain, different kinds of metadata may be produced by highly different methods and of substantially different semantic value. The CODAC Project, led by Harald Kosch, implements different multimedia processes and ties them together in the life cycle. To demonstrate metadata's lifecycle, consider a use case scenario. A user watches an interesting music video on a colleague's screen and wants to retrieve the same music video. The only information she retained was that the singer in the music was Avril Lavigne, and she remembers the song's melody. She can't ask her colleague directly, so she wants to access it from a multimedia database. A multimedia database, the Multimedia Data Cartridge (MDC) defines several application libraries for metadata production. The libraries offer a means for multimedia annotation and content-based retrieval for different media types.

This article introduces the Extended Cellular Automata with Pluggable Multimedia Elements, a prototype for generating multimedia content. The prototype acts as an open environment that lets users execute cellular automata in three dimensions and manage simultaneous rendering of cellular automata using different forms of presentation. In principle, users can attach any type of multimedia presentation as a plug-in. Prospective users include researchers and students interested in studying cellular automata dynamics. Another class of users is computer artists interested in generating visual or sound patterns for performances. It also acts as a source of parameter configurations for other applications. Its architecture follows the cooperative visual environment three-tiered organization, offering an execution layer for managing the cellular automation logic and keeping the information about the configuration, a presentation layer for managing different forms of visual- or sound-based rendering and an intermediate model layer for decoupling the cellular automata's internal organization from the different presentation forms. INSET: Cellular Automata and ExcapeMe Extensions.

The article describes a multimedia approach to the efficient implementation and use of emergency plans using the subway system of Valencia, Spain as an example. Metro Valencia is the public company that manages the railway transportation in the Valencia metropolitan area. In 1998, the Metro Valencia Safety Office began developing a system to improve its emergency plan. The Hypermedia Emergency Plan has been operational since June 2000 at the Metro Valencia's Traffic Control Office. Without the Hypermedia plan, emergency procedures are carried out manually. Its advent has greatly streamlined the execution of emergency procedures. Currently, when an emergency occurs, the safety manager interacts with the hypermedia plan instead of the paper-based plan. The solution is applicable to other public service organizations like hotels, stadiums, theaters and even whole cities in case of natural disasters. Although every situation is different, and many specific details must be taken into account, systems supporting emergency management must fulfill two basic requirements. First, they must provide multimedia storage and delivery. Second, they must support advanced, workflow-like navigation of the available information. Based on the experience gathered from the Valencia project, a number of issues have been identified that need attention and further research before safety-oriented systems are widely used. These are process, presentation, information management and retrieval, communication, collaboration and intelligence.

This article discusses the application of the mobiDENK mobile information system in modern monument conservation. MobiDENK is a location-aware system that draws the visitor's attention to historic sites of interest and provides location-dependent multimedia information. The technology runs on a personal digital assistant with an integrated global positioning system receiver. By locating the user and showing position and path on an interactive map, mobiDENK offers visual navigation support. When developing mobile applications, researchers discover that different applications often share similar requirements such as location sensing, location visualization, presentation of points of interest, and so on. User reactions to mobiDENK showed that the general public valued the system's combination of mobile hardware, location awareness and multimedia content.

Introduces the results of the Authoring 744 research initiative, which uses MPEG-7 standards to synthesize multimedia content. Areas serviced by the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards; Reason for the need for complex authoring tools; Key asset for the design of any computer game. INSET: Current MPEG-7 Tools.

Defines an informal framework for user-oriented quality of service specification and enforcement. Requirement of the use of multimedia database systems; Notions foreign to conventional database management systems; Challenge posed by multimedia systems. INSETS: QoS in Multimedia Databases;Architecture to Support QoS.

Discusses the experiments that evaluated the pedagogical efficiency of the Logiocando hypermedia as compared to traditional classroom instruction. Information on Logiocando hypermedia; Details of the evaluation conducted on Logiocando; Discussion of the hypermedia's test section. INSET: Previous Research.

Describes the BilVideo video database management systems. System architecture; Description of its fact-extraction process; Functionality of its video-annotator tool; Query specification windows of its user interface. INSET: Query Types.

One of the main problems in the database area is to define query languages characterized by both high expressive power and ease of use. In this paper, we propose a system to query databases, using diagrams as a standard user interface. The system, called Query by Diagram* (QBD*), makes use of a conceptual data model, a query language on this model, and a graphical user interface. The conceptual model is the Entity-Relationship Model; the query language, whose expressive power allows recursive queries, supports visual interaction. The main characteristics of the interface are ease of use and the availability of a rich set of primitives for schema selection and query formulation. Furthermore, we compare the expressive power of QBD* and G+, which are the only languages allowing recursive queries to be expressed graphically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the mutual relationship between database querying and Internet navigation. Some crucial issues related to database interaction in the global information infrastructure; Visual approach to database interfaces; Hypertext-based database interaction; The global information system; Conclusions.