36.1 Related Work

"There aim is to ensure that when a paper refers to another paper, a click on the reference will bring up the second paper, along with a list of all other papers that cite it. In this way the interdependent web of the scientific world reveals itself: each discovery built on the bricks of hundreds before it, all now connected by a trail of mouse clicks."

-- The Economist, [Eco95b]

Electronic proceedings are no new idea; for nearly as long as there have been computer networks and conference papers written on the computer, researchers have found ways to make their conferences papers available on the network. The first electronic proceedings in either CD-ROM or on-line format were restricted to offering printed documentation in electronic form. Main advantages were cheaper mass production and improved search facilities. Talks, lectures, panel discussions and audiovisual presentations remained an experience reserved to conference attendees. As time has passed, new interfaces for retrieving and searching papers have been implemented and a variety of proceedings have been created. The following listing of conference intends to give a representative overview of the field, with no claim on completeness. For a broad comparison of multimedia conference proceedings see [Reb95].

Official SEAM'92 CD-ROM, Proceedings of the 1992 MacSciTech Conference on Scientific and Engineering Applications for the Macintosh [Mac93].

This was one of the first multimedia conference proceedings on CD-ROM, combining hypertext presented in HyperCard, images and video. Its early appearance and diverse content make it an interesting first attempt at interactive electronic proceedings, although the limited technology of the time and some user interface decisions make it less useful than it could be.

http://superbook.bellcore.com/SB/IWANNT/iwannt93.eprocs.html. 1993 International Workshop on Applications of Neural Networks to Telecommunications implemented in SuperBook, accessible on the Internet under X-windows [All93].

The proceedings are presented with SuperBook, a sophisticated hypertext system. They therefore provide a rich navigation structure and sophisticated annotation facilities that are built into SuperBook. Because the proceedings are networked, participants can add annotations that other participants can view and extend.

Proceedings of the ACM 1993 Conference on Multimedia on CD-ROM [Rad93].

This CD-ROM product is based on Adobe Acrobat displaying distilled PostScript documents in PDF format. It also includes some QuickTime and MPEG movies. As with the SuperComputing'93 proceedings (see below), the greatest drawback of these proceedings is their fixation on the printed page. The lack of sophisticated searching and annotation make this type of proceedings seem like little more than an electronic viewer of printed pages.

Proceedings of SuperComputing'93 on CD-ROM [Ieee93].

The proceedings are distributed on a multiplatform CD-ROM for UNIX, Macintosh and Windows containing text and graphics from the conference. Similarly to the ACM'93 Multimedia proceedings the viewer directly displays an image of the printed page in PostScript format.

http://ada.computer.org/conferen/sc94/SC94Home.html Proceedings of Supercomputing'94: The Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications on the web [Ieee94].

These are rather straight forward WWW proceedings containing mostly abstracts and the option of downloading PostScript versions of the talks.

http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/Electronic/documnts/top.html Proceedings of the ACM 1995 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [Mac95].

The CHI'95 Conference Proceedings and Companion CD-ROM combine CD-ROM and WWW. The multimedia proceedings on CD-ROM include electronic versions of the papers linked to digital movies. The size of the available movies varies from one to twenty megabytes. The Internet download time for such files seems prohibitive. The primary intention for users that have Internet connection is therefore to use the CD-ROM as a means to more efficiently play back movies. The HTML version has lately been revised, and offers the full papers in HTML format.

http://town.hall.org/university/network/estrin Deborah Estrin, RSVP, web talk on the Internet University.

The WWW version of a talk by Deborah Estrin on the Cisco NetWorkers'94 conference is one of the first implementations of multimedia presentations over the web. Although the system exhibits some design flaws, it is an early experiment on web talks that gave us valuable hints for our own work implementing the DAGS'95 talks.

All of the above listed multimedia conference proceedings exhibit some common weaknesses:

• Text is normally delivered rather straightforward. It is either displayed as a PostScript image, or, for the papers on the web, the whole paper is directly converted to HTML. The capabilities of the hypertext concept allowing non-linear browsing and searching are mostly neglected.
• It seems that the network bandwidth is still considered too narrow for allowing to transmit video or audio versions of talks over the web. The talk by Deborah Estrin mentioned above illustrates these shortcomings: although the audio track has been broken into separate clips each belonging to one slide, those clips are still prohibitively large for downloading over a modem connection. The RealAudio system, described in chapter IV.5.4, offers a proprietary solution.
• Normally it takes a very long time to develop multimedia versions of conference proceedings. With the exception of the SuperComputing 93, the ACM Multimedia 93, and the CHI'95 proceedings, all of the conference proceedings appeared well after the conference. Since conferences present new results, timeliness is a very important feature requiring new methods for speeding up the multimedia proceedings development process.

Our own work on the DAGS multimedia conference proceedings series specifically addresses these shortcomings and offers possible solutions.