Description of the HYPERMEDIA ACTS-361 Project: continuous audiovisual market in Europe

HYPERMEDIA (AC361) is a project actually running under the ACTS Programme of the European Commission. It started June 1st, 1998 and will extend for 2 years. Actually, there is an open market framework to deploy interactive telecommunication services dealing with browsing, handling, and delivery of continuous information media: communication and media corporations compete to offer the best services to their final users. HYPERMEDIA will show a complete pilot solution for service provisioning within this continuous audiovisual market, attending to all its aspects (metadata, video indexing tools for content based metadata generation, database and network architectures, intellectual property rights services), evaluated on the basis of a realistic trial implemented in the project. HYPERMEDIA will make a follow up and will contribute to standardisation efforts on content based metadata such as MPEG-7. There is an important challenge to avoid being overtaken by products of the marketplace and research advances during the execution of the project