The MHEG standard and its relation with the multimedia and hypermedia area

The achievement of monomedia standards in ISO, the foreseen explosion of multimedia and hypermedia systems, the evolution of networks and lastly, the need to ease the development of the related market in an open environment have urged ISO to define a generic international standard. This standard provides the coded representation of final form of elementary multimedia and hypermedia objects. They will be interchanged as a whole within or across services and applications. This standard also provides facilities for the special needs of real-time interactive systems with minimal resources. The ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 (Coded Representation of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information) and CCITT SGVIII have formed a joint working group known as MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Expert Group). The authors look at the work of this group