Communications of the ACM - Special issue on digital multimedia systems
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This paper describes an ongoing research program for the development of an electronic news delivery system that exploits the promised high-bandwidth, switched, interactive communication facilities of the information highway. The research program is in a preliminary stage and will investigate the design and organization of the news sources, client/server architecture, and user interfaces leading to a prototype model electronic news delivery system. Initially based on a newspaper metaphor, the system will exploit communication and multimedia technologies to integrate other news sources, such as newscasts and video clips, with the text backbone. The system will provide selective content delivery based on individual and group profiles, hypertext links into archival and external data, continuous coverage of news stories, interactive objects, and "smart" advertising.An initial prototype client has been developed using data that include video clips and news and photos from the Halifax newspaper, The Chronicle-Herald. An abstract data representation was developed for the integration of layout, syntactic, and semantic information from a variety of sources for the dynamic presentation and manipulation of the news items. This prototype allows us to explore the potential of the medium for supporting user interfaces that cope with a potentially large number of news items in a very restricted screen space and the potential for innovative advertising unlike any advertising we currently experience.