Project No.: 5003-045332 01.03.96 - 31.12.99

Project leader: Dr. Dimitri Konstantas, Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI), University of Geneva
e-mail: dimitri@cui.unige.ch

Name of project: MEDIA: Mobile Electronic Documents with Interacting Agents

Partial projects: 5003-045333 (Konstantas), 5003-045334 (Pun), 5003-045335 (Tsichritzis)

Funding: Sfr 0.-

Summary:
In today’s digital society, the electronic publishing, distribution and storage of documents is bringing increasingly tangible social, economic and cultural benefits. In highly competitive environments (industry, finance, government, research, etc.), keeping informed is an important prerequisite of success, and the rapid distribution of information is therefore crucial. The G-7 conference on the information society identified the multimedia digitization of libraries and the contents of museums as a key factor in ensuring their dissemination.

MEDIA is an umbrella project which aims to develop an archiving and commercial distribution system for electronic documents in line with the needs of today’s printing industry using an agent-based distributed secure platform.

MEDIA can be divided into the following component projects:

• Hypernews (Konstantas): development and realization of a commercial distribution system for electronic documents. The second phase of the project moves on from newspaper articles to books and similar products.
• KryPict: development of a copyright enforcement and document authentication method based on the "watermarking" method developed in phase one;
• ASAP: development of distributed applications over extensive, dynamic networks on the basis of mobile software agents. The second phase will focus on developing a JAVA virtual machine and byte-code transport format.

MEDIA system features:

• agent-based architecture;
• "watermarking": mechanisms for image copyright enforcement and authentication;
• database storage and retrieval of multimedia documents;
• user interface: an interface that lets users store and retrieve documents in various formats;
• security on 3 levels: agent design (virus protection), contents (copyright enforcement) and transport (validation and authentication).

The findings of the MEDIA project are being put into place as a demonstrator by a commercial partner.

Cooperation:
The MEDIA integrated research team comprises the Object System Group, Multimedia Communications Group, Computer Vision Group and Theoretical Computer Science Group, all of the University of Geneva. Industrial input is provided by r3 security engineering ag, Aathal, the Swiss Paper Museum, Basel, and the Department of Scientific Photography of the University of Basel. Prospective end-users are the weekly news magazine L’Hebdo, the Swiss Paper Museum, Basel, the documentation and archives services of Télévision Suisse Romande and the Swiss Cultural Heritage database.