The good, the bad and the ugly about multimedia conferencing services

摘要

The good about multimedia conferencing (MMC) is that everybody likes to use it. The bad is that almost no standards or recommendations for MMC exist, and the ugly is that this situation prohibits the wide-spread availability of multimedia conferencing services. The article discusses problems and proposes solutions with respect to standardising MMC services. Some of the problems of existing MMC services is that most of them do not operate in a distributed multi-vendor heterogeneous environment. To operate in such an environment, as proposed by the TINA project, generic MMC interfaces should be specified. As a starting point for standardization specifications of the MMC operational interface, the stream interface and the management interface are given. The interfaces are specified from an information and computational viewpoint as defined by RM-ODP, using techniques like OMT and OMG IDL.