FEATURE SET AND ARCHITECTURE OF A MULTIMEDIA NEWS SYSTEM OVER AN ATM NETWORK

In this paper we discuss a multimedia news system that we have develop ed in the Multimedia Information Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa and beyond. We focus on the feature set-that is, the tools and facilities associated with the system. We explain the functionalit y of each and give some real examples of the system in action. We then outline the architecture-the system consists of a production server f or document authoring, a conferencing system for collaborative news ar ticle creation, a content database for authors, a hypernews database f or hypermedia news documents, a news database server with aging and ar chiving, and user sites. The goal was to have all components of the sy stem communicating on OCRInet-an R&D ATM network in the Ottawa region. We then introduce the challenges of representing and browsing large v ideo objects and to this end we introduce a novel solution that we cal l video-tiles. This video tool is an effective way to browse large new s videos that are frequently connected with our multimedia news articl es.