Distributed Multimedia Object/Component Systems (DMMOS'2001)

The design and implementation of distributed multimedia systems (especially multimedia infrastructure) show a high divergence among proprietary systems - multimedia standards being the only glue keeping them working together. If distributed multimedia is to become a key technology for the next decade then it must adopt object and component-based philosophies. Nowadays, multimedia systems are implemented partly in an ancient, monolithic style, which is acceptable for the childhood of a new technology, but which will not work in its mature phase.

Much effort has been invested in developing frameworks to support the client-side of multimedia applications (such as Java Media Framework). Modern middleware approaches also incorporate both component-oriented and quality-of-service aspects (such as Corba 3.0 and Enterprise Java Beans). Object-relational databases provide progressively better support for storing and streaming multimedia data (such as Oracle Video Server). Multimedia standards, more and more, are covering the structuring of multimedia data (such as video-objects in MPEG-4) and are adding semantic information (such as MPEG-7). Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid so far to the software technology of entire, large-scale distributed multimedia systems (incl. applications and infrastructure). It is urgently needed to build fully connected bridges between the three still more or less independent areas: distributed, multimedia and object-oriented systems. These bridges might either stem from modeling approaches for designing or from implementation techniques for distributed multimedia systems.