The world is inherently complex and multimedia in nature. The development of computer systems to tackle real-world problems is an extremely difficult task. As computers capable of manipulating multimedia information are becoming more powerful and commonplace, larger and more complex systems are increasingly being built. To fully comprehend the complexity of such undertakings, proper modeling of multimedia information and systems must be carried out.A model provides a high-level abstraction of the system in which the implementation is based upon. It permits the desirable properties of the system to be extracted and analyzed and also provides a uniform framework for integration between different systems, and for interactions between the system and human users.This volume is devoted to the discussion of effective modeling of multimedia information and systems for a wide range of applications. It aims to provide common modeling frameworks for the integration of the diverse subjects in the field of multimedia information.

Since the beginning of human history we have had a communication network that is identical with the physical distribution network. In the late 19th century we established the energy network to distribute electric and thermal energy, launching the modern society. The analog communication network became popular in the middle of the 20th century. And now, at the end of the 20th century, we have global digital information networks.Along with the advancement of the communication network, the progress of the information processing technology can be classified into three historical phases. The first phase technology is physical information processing, treating physical data from the real world. This technology is often called “signal processing” and is based on the physical law of nature. The second phase is free from the physical constraints. It is logical information processing, dealing with knowledge and rules. The most important aspect of this phase is consistency. “Provable” is employed to confirm the reality of the system.Based on the advanced computer and network technology, we are entering the third phase of information processing, which is “Kansei” information processing. (”Kansei” is a Japanese word expressing some subjective ability referred to as “sensibility”, “intuition”, “affection” or “emotion”). Emotional resonance or consent is important in the pursuit of reality in this phase.Multimedia modeling to harmonize different media and systems is one of the key technologies in the third phase of information processing. It will provide a next generation framework to construct a human-centered information environment that is more comfortable and more productive.This volume is devoted to a discussion on effective modeling of multimedia information and systems for a wide range of applications. It contains 30 technical articles, all of which were selected, after vigorous peer reviews, for presentation at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling held in Nagano, Japan, on 13-15 November 2000.

Multimedia systems result from the merging of the computing, communications and broadcasting industries. This merging has been made possible today by the technical advances in high speed broadband networks, computer desktop workstations, and information storage and compression techniques.Currently, text and image are the predominant forms of information exchanged over the Internet. However, there are clear signs that the situation is rapidly changing with the recent emergence of multimedia applications in the area of education, business, e-commerce and entertainment — resulting, therefore, in increased consumption of network bandwidth and in the creation of a very large volume of information that needs to be processed and stored. This trend has made strong demands on the multimedia modeling research community to develop new semantic models that will further facilitate the creation, representation, manipulation and animation of multimedia content with a better level of granularity than what is possible to achieve with today's multimedia information systems.This volume explores issues associated with multimedia modeling information and systems and presents the current status of work in this field. It covers a broad range of theoretical, conceptual and practical topics and addresses the needs of a wide audience, including researchers, multimedia systems designers and users of multimedia systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2007. It covers work on foundations and semantics of timed systems; examines techniques, algorithms, data structures, and software tools for analyzing timed systems and resolving temporal constraints; and details applications like real-time software, hardware circuits, and problems of scheduling in manufacturing and telecommunication.

This volume covers: hypermedia; image and video retrieval; video-based multimedia applications; authoring and visualization of multimedia information; networked multimedia and virtual environments; topological and 3-D geometric modelling; and real-time and interactive multimedia applications."

[Administration (référence électronique] ; informatique].

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL'99, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 1999. The 100 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on visual information systems, interactive visual query, Internet search engines, video parsing, spatial data, visual languages, features and indexes for image retrieval, object retrieval, ranking and performance, shape retrieval, retrieval systems, image compression, virtual environments, recognition systems, and visualization systems.