This book constitutes the refereeed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Multimedia Applications, Services and Techniques, ECMAST '98, held in Berlin, Germany, in May 1998. The 40 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book by the program committee. The topics covered include multimedia networks and protocols; coded representation of images, sound, and data; multimedia delivery on broadcast and telecom networks; servers and storage architechtures; advanced multimedia terminals and in house networks; multimedia services; Internet and multimedia scenario; and multimedia trials.

The liberalisation in the telecommunication market and thus the advent of competition has had a tremendous impact on business in this area. New operators have started to offer telecommunication services in competition with the classical national network operators. This in turn will have an impact on the market share, the tariff structure, the Quality of Service (QoS) and the services offered to the end customers. A way to maintain or increase revenue for network operators is to additionally offer new services to the customers. The final target is a so-called "Full Service Network (FSN)", which is capable of offering all types of bi-directional multimedia services. The provisioning of new telecommunication services in general and new multimedia services in particular is made possible by the availability of several new technologies as well as through advances in standardisation. R&D policies world-wide but especially in Europe have forced the development of new networking technologies such as ATM, xDSL and HFC as well as new video technologies as defined by DVB and DAVIC.

Multimedia Applications discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia document handling, programming, security, human computer interfaces, and multimedia application services. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices. Fundamental information and properties of hypermedia document handling, multimedia security and various aspects of multimedia applications are presented, especially about document handling and their standards, programming of multimedia applications, design of multimedia information at human computer interfaces, multimedia security challenges such as encryption and watermarking, multimedia in education, as well as multimedia applications to assist preparation, processing and application of multimedia content.

Mobile working and remote working from home or a small office, using phone, PC, fax and narrowband Internet is a rapidly increasing practice. The many well-documented benefits of working this way include higher productivity, more time spent with the family and local community and less time wasted commuting. At a community level they include benefits to the environment through substituting physical transport by telecommunications, and re-vitalisation of ruiral communities. Yet, people who work mainly this way face severe problems: a loss of contact with the office grapevine, the out of sight, out of mind syndrome, and exclusion from vital ad-hoc meetings and tutorials. Another major problem is slow speed of communication. This volume summarizes how technologies can revolutionise flexible working practices and go a long way towards solving the isolation problems of flexible workers.

This book constitutes the refereeed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Multimedia Applications, Services and Techniques, ECMAST '98, held in Berlin, Germany, in May 1998. The 40 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book by the program committee. The topics covered include multimedia networks and protocols; coded representation of images, sound, and data; multimedia delivery on broadcast and telecom networks; servers and storage architechtures; advanced multimedia terminals and in house networks; multimedia services; Internet and multimedia scenario; and multimedia trials.

The refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CaiSE 2003, held in Klagenfurt, Austria in June 2003. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 219 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML, methods and models for information systems, UML, Internet business and social modeling, peer-to-peer systems, ontology-based methods, advanced design of information systems, knowledge, knowledge management, Web services, data warehouses, electronic agreements and workflow, requirements engineering, metrics and method engineering, and agent technologies and advanced environments.