Distributed multimedia information systems

The Distributed Link Service (DLS) infrastructure for linking hypertext documents on the World Wide Web complies with the open hypermedia model. In combination with link processing and management tools, we're addressing distributed information management issues. Our approach, focusing on multimedia streams and facilitating collaboration, reflects two key trends in network technology: an increase in per-user bandwidth and hosts. This corresponds to more users working with more media of increasingly different types. Open hypermedia can provide new techniques that let us take advantage of this evolution. We're extending our streaming work to HyperRadio, building on the idea that a program is actually a tour through available resources, where users can interactively follow links to other resources that interest them. By exploiting higher bandwidths and compression techniques, we can transport such "branching" material to the user. We're conducting this work with audio streams on the Internet, and plan to apply it to digital audio broadcasting.