Broadband Multimedia Information Service for European Parliaments

This paper presents a distributed broadband multimedia information service that is realised within the project EPRICOM that is supported by the European Union within the ACTS program. The primary idea of the EPRI-COM information service is to provide in-depth information from the Europen parliament to the parliamentarians of Central and Eastern Europe supporting the integration process of these countries in the EU in this way. The technical basis of the EPRI-COM project is a novel network of media servers providing audio/video streams of high quality to a number of widely distributed clients. The server network and the EPRI-COM information service is managed by a distributed server management system presented in this paper. In the current phase of the EPRI-COM project, six parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the European parliament are connected to the EPRICOM service. 1 Objectives of EPRI-COM The EPRI-COM project which is fully named as “European Parliament Research Initiative Communicating with the Central and Eastern European Countries”, implements a broadband information service for parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe as well as for the parliamentarians of the European parliament. The primary idea of this information service is to provide in-depth information from the Europen This work was supported by the projects EPRI-COM and SICMA funded by the European Union in the framework of the program ACTS (Advanced Communication Technologies and Services). parliament and the European Commission to the parliamentarians of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) stimulating the integration process of these countries in the European Union in this way. Thus, the EPRI-COM project has a number of political and technical objectives. On the political side the idea of the EPRI-COM project is to provide in-depth information about the different processes going on within the European Union and which are of relevance for the integration of the CEE countries in the European Union. The content provided by the EPRI-COM service via conventional Internet (WWW) is grouped into a number of “Subjects of interest (SOI)”. Currently there are about 35 SOIs that are maintained by the EPRI-COM service. They are grouped into four main areas which are: “CEE Countries and the EU Information and Communication Technology Programmes and Initiatives”, “EU Enlargement Strategies”, “Economics in Transition” and “CEE Countries and the Process of Accession”. For all of the 35 SOIs detailled information is grouped together by an agency in Brussels that has direct access to the processes within the European parliament and the Commission of the European Community. Thus, the information provided within the EPRI-COM information service has highest quality and relevance. On the technical side the idea of the EPRI-COM project is to provide not only conventional Web information, e.g. texts, graphics, pictures, but also audio/video streams of hiqh quality (MPEG-1). These media information present interviews, samples from conferences and discussions from the European parliament and a large number of other sources. As an example, the European parliaments produces every week a short summary of the main activities of the week as a 30 minutes video. This collects the most impor-