Taxonomy of Multimedia Applications

In this section we provide an overview of current applications of Multimedia Systems.

Recall that a broad definition of a Multimedia Application is an Application which uses a collection of multiple media sources e.g. text, graphics, images, sound/audio, animation and/or video.

Multimedia applications may be classified in a few ways:

Field Of Application

-- How they are used, e.g. Medical Diagnostics, Collaborative Learning etc.

Media Employed

-- what media they use

How they are used

-- For example:

• People-to-people -- where the application is being used to aid communication between humans e.g. Collaborative Learning, Video Conferencing
• People-to-systems, People-to-systems -- basically providing access to (send and receive) multimedia information.

People-to-people applications could be subdivided to categorise:

• private vs professional applications
• interpersonal (two-way only) or group oriented applications
• real-time vs asynchronous applications.