MPEG-7 Compliant Community Hosting

Community hosting engines support professional, scientific and recreational communication and collaboration for communities of practice on the Internet. The success of community hosting for professionals and scientists in engineering disciplines or the humanities depends on the community engine's capabilities to reflect the discursive hypermedia knowledge in cross media sets, drawings, animations, pictures, digital videos, texts etc. The rapidly changing needs of the community, the trend for multidisciplinary work and research, and the challenges of sophisticated multimedia technologies demand novel approaches to flexible, evolving, adaptable, and interoperable community engines. Thus, we introduce a novel, self-reflexive information system architecture called ATLAS to support communities by multimedia services on the basis of the multimedia content description interface MPEG-7. As a proof of concept we present in this paper a variety of communities of practice supported by ATLAS.