| Popis: |
CD-ROM publishing of interactive multimedia has generally taken the model of the printing press and transferred it into the new digital medium. Even when presented as interactive multimedia, the content itself is frozen in time and not updatable. This is frustrating since a new CD-ROM becomes old hat as soon as it is pressed. More than a year ago we integrated most of Jane Goodall's fieldwork amongst the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, into a CD-ROM title using sound, images, video and text together with an intuitive and explorative interface. In teaching courses with “Virtual Chimps” as we called it, we soon discovered that CD-ROMs are an island solution far removed from what we envision as a global knowledge system. Until the time when all knowledge in all media can be accessed over networks, a hybrid system is desirable which makes the transition from CD-ROM published titles to information accessed over networks. We have therefore produced a CD-ROM which contains our software engine to analyze chimpanzee behavior but also anchors to the WWW using Mosaic as client. With this configuration and linkage to our own fileserver, our CD-ROM works as a hybrid system: it performs customized tasks on a local workstation but is able to interchange and integrate data with other WWW file servers. The output of any analysis can be shared with other users over the WWW and additional information gathered world wide can be integrated seamlessly into the system. |
