Rainer Pagé, Klaus Süllow Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute GMD - IPSI Dolivostr. 15 D-64293 Darmstadt
{page,suellow}@darmstadt.gmd.de
The MultiMedia Forum (MMF) [SUE93] is a running electronic online journal in use as an inhouse journal at GMD, which is produced regularly by an editorial team in GMD's Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI). The system is based on a SGML database managing documents according to an comprehensive SGML Document Type Definition (DTD) including workflow management information and access rights. Two types of environments - one for the readers, one for the editors - allow access to this database (see picture). Multimedia documents like digital video sequences or images have the same general form as text documents, but contain a reference to a multimedia content file instead of logically structured text. The textual parts of the documents can contain hyperlinks to other documents of the database - these are addressed by their unique database identifier - or to arbitrary documents in the W3 identified by an URL. Vice versa the MMF database can be accessed via W3.
While the readers' environment allows simple access to the MMF database to casual users as well as to regular readers and thus shows some similarities with WWW browsers like Mosaic or Netscape, the editorial environment is more elaborated: it enables the editor to query the database, to import, create or edit documents (multimedia as well as textual ones) and has in-built capabilities for automatic supervising the documents' life (from creation to publication and, finally, to archiving or deletion).
As has been mentioned, the MMF database contents can be accessed from the WWW, and on the other hand MMF documents may contain hyperlinks pointing at arbitrary URLs. This gives us the chance to manage the information offered in the WWW by means of the MMF editorial system.
It turns out that computer-based publishing becomes a more complicated task if the publishing product is disseminated into a hyperweb not being controlled by the publishers, that is, if the WWW comes into play. The product's quality doesn't longer depend solely on its own content, but additionally on the contents of the hypernodes reachable from the product via hyperlinks. A tool for inspection of the "border region between product and online world" will help the editorial staff to master this quality problem.
The BWON system [SUE95] is such a editorial tool fulfilling two tasks:
We will demonstrate navigation in the WWW and the MMF using the BWON Browser (see our screenshot). Furthermore, importing and converting information found in the WWW into the local editorial SGML database system (the MMF) will be shown.