It may be that the successful standards in the real world are those which have some clear idea of being one or other of these.
The workshop did not address all of the relevant standards, or even attempt to conduct a classification that will come later as one of the outputs.
Examples which were presented at the workshop and which are included here are:
The inclusion or exclusion of any standard in this report should not be seen as being of significance at this stage.
MHEG provides standardised encoding for the interchange of multimedia hypermedia objects and supports real-time and non-real-time interchange of final form information objects, in interactive environments.
PBecause this workshop seems to be addressing the issue of recommending "a, or several" possible file formats for multimedia and hypermedia content data for use by UK educational institutions, it is important that the MHEG approach to the interchange of such objects be clearly enunciated and understood.MHEG supports the philosophy that users (or using applications) provide for data file formats, and provides a hook or hook object to identify a variety of content types. Such an approach allows for interoperability among users, and flexibility for the user to choose its formats. An appendix to MHEG, which has now been made into a Technical Report, shows how mappings might be made between ODA document forms and MHEG content objects. The MHEG Hook provides for standard and proprietary media data to be interchanged.
SC29's work has been directed at encoding and compression of Hypermedia Multimedia data. Multimedia and hypermedia concepts have not been appended onto another standard that was developed for other purposes, consequently the focus and scope is to support standard interchange formats. One must assume that standard file formats are desired because users wish to interchange files and process them on a variety of platforms, i.e., they desire interoperability. Naturally each standards creating group would like to see its own file formats adapted as the universal format within as many domains as possible. MHEG is no different in desiring to see its standard adopted by a broad base of user groups, but the difference lies in supporting user preferences and multiple specific requirements with respect to file formats. MHEG supports interchange of heterogeneous file formats, and does not support the philosophy or view that hypermedia and multimedia information be constrained by the format of the file structure, since it can provide a standardised interchange mechanism independent of file content, or structure.
Graphics Multimedia Virtual Environments Visualisation Contents