Elin: a Newspaper Universal Multimedia Access Platform Based on Mpeg Standards

Nowadays, technologies involved in Web information distribution services are evolving to adapt themselves to new user requirements. Usually, these new technologies are used separately. This paper presents ELIN (Electronic Newspaper Initiative) project, an European Commission funded project, that tries to integrate the newest standards and technologies involved in multimedia delivery. It has as objective the delivery of any type of media format to any kind of user terminal in an efficient way. In order to do that, it takes the approach of using MPEG standards: MPEG-4 for video delivery, MPEG-7 for data classification and MPEG-21 for data management and adaptation. So it integrates the totality of solutions provided for the MPEG group. In order to test this technology, ELIN has chosen the online newspaper field. Therefore, it provides a toolkit to be used by mass media companies to set an advanced electronic newspaper. This toolkit enables to personalize the delivery of news using collaborative filtering, to build a XML file architecture to store and manage data, to deliver information in video (MPEG-4) or in HTML format for low capabilities devices, to adapt media for different capabilities terminals and includes a 3 Dimension environment to create an user community to communicate between them and share data objects.