Design Management of Multimedia Information Systems: Opportunities, Challenges

Citation

Premkamolnetr, N. (2002), "Design Management of Multimedia Information Systems: Opportunities, Challenges", Online Information Review, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 57-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2002.26.1.57.2

Multimedia has increasingly been used in most application areas, such as communication, education, entertainment and e‐commerce. There is no doubt that electronic multimedia information certainly “enhances users’ ability to communicate and collaborate”. However, the media‐generated data will not effectively meet user needs unless they are well designed and managed – hence the underlying value of this book.

The work is divided into six sections. The first, on modelling for multimedia communication, management and retrieval, contains six chapters. Chapter 1 provides fundamental terminology, definitions and theory of multimedia systems, and then more specific topics, such as architecture for media content management, methods of extracting the content, design of the multimedia storage servers, etc., are presented in the following chapters.

The second section, on media retrieval and database access, contains four chapters that elaborate issues of data retrieval. The first of these chapters outlines the design and evaluation of a content‐based image‐retrieval system, and subsequent chapters discuss the design of multimedia document retrieval systems that can support both structure‐based and content‐based retrieval. The development of a content‐based retrieval system for video documents and fuzzy query language for multimedia data are also discussed.

The third and fourth sections are devoted to aspects of application design. Section 3, which comprised four chapters, focuses on 2D, 3D multimedia and virtual reality applications. A case study on design and development of a multimedia dictionary of Slovenian sign language is used to help explain the theoretical concepts. Three chapters in the fourth focus on one aspect, educational multimedia. Such relevant issues as research findings from a pedagogical‐related project, guidelines for the effective design and use, as well as questions and answers about the cost of production of educational multimedia are all addressed in these chapters.

The fifth section discusses temporal modelling in multimedia presentations. The three chapters here discuss temporal models, certain techniques of multimedia authoring, and research issues related to spatio‐temporal data modelling. The last section is about multimedia copyright, which includes a taxonomy of copyright protection methods and protection methods for documents and software.

This volume offers comprehensive treatment of multimedia information management and design. The topics included are not only theoretical but also practice‐oriented, which give the readers more insight into the topics. Additionally, the editor and the 54 authors responsible for the chapters have contributed different perspectives to the key issues, as they come from many countries – including the USA, Germany, France, Denmark, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Taiwan and Slovenia. All of the authors have extensive background in the areas of computer science and engineering. This book is suitable for students, lecturers, researchers whose interests are in multimedia information systems, as well as computer specialists working in library or information centres or organisations offering multimedia information systems to their clients.