Cultural journeys in the information society

This paper describes the Cultural Journeys in the Information Society (CJIS) project. CJIS project is an INCO project (973324) funded by the ECC and its aims to address the problem of electronic information roads at various levels and to develop a prototype system of such roads. The prototype will concentrate at first on cultural and historical information and the social relevance of such roads in education and training. This paper defines the notion of electronic information roads and explores the technical form which these roads can take. An electronic road is the user's navigation path through a multimedia environment. More precisely, it is a series of links to the system's Information Units (IU) the user chooses to follow through. IUs are the building blocks of the available information content and consist of the actual data (e.g. segment of video, image, sound or text) with an attached metadata index (semantic or system). The system produces a number of dynamic links that point the user to new Information Units. These dynamic links are based on the IU's semantic nature and the user's profile.