Distributed Objects: an approach to sharing multimedia information

This paper addresses the issue of multimedia cooperative work. An ODP based view of the system is discussed taking into account some of the viewpoints of the standard. Special emphasis is given to the modeling of multimedia stream interfaces and the concept of binding object which is a key concept. The paper describes a multimedia distributed platform, DIMPLE, supporting interactive and distributed multimedia applications. The example application implemented allows for a shared synchronized access to multimedia information systems and includes an off-the-shelf videoconferencing system which is a non-ODP product. It is shown that the concept of binding object makes the integration very easy.