I-MEDIA - AN INTEGRATED MEDIA SERVER AND MEDIA DATABASE AS A BASIC COMPONENT OF A CROSS MEDIA PUBLISHING SYSTEM

The publication of the same information on different media, the so-cal led Cross Media Publishing (CMP), is becoming one of the central aspec ts in today's publishing industry. CMP centers on a media independent document definition and an efficient integrated publishing on differen t media: e.g. as a paper document, as an online document in the World Wide Web, and as an offline (CD-ROM based) multimedia presentation. Th e aim of CMP is to get these different media at the same stage, while- and that is important-spending an acceptable amount of additional effo rt (in time and money) for production. In this paper we present a solu tion for a key problem of Cross Media Publishing, the handling of medi a data (images, audio, video, etc.) by using a combined approach of se rver and database systems functionality. The integrated multimedia ser ver and database i-Media and its role in a complete CMP solution will be presented. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.