Institute of Transport Studies, University of Leeds
Abstract
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, there is an ever-increasing demand and interest in the use of multimedia
technology and applications in industry, government and academia. Multimedia is often
seen by researchers as the next step forward in interfacing science, technology and
community. Yet, the terminology of multimedia bears several meanings. It may refer to
Compact Disc (CD), moving pictures or video-conferencing. The multimedia technology
referred in this paper is the World Wide Web (WWW) hypertext publishing information
system which was developed by and started at the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Since the introduction of WWW, its use has
increased dramatically within a couple of years in a widely diverse community including
government departments, university and research establishments, and commercial
organisations. It has significant influence to our communities and our daily lives. Yet, in
most cases, applications of WWW services are largely restricted to electronic library
referencelcatalogue search facilities, electronic mail systems, electronic conference and
discussion systems, electronic news and publishing agents, and remote access to computing
resources on the Internet.
The primary objective of this paper is to exploit the potential of this multimedia technology
as a simple, easy-to-use and effective means of telematics application in transportation
research. It is hoped that initiatives are highlighted via this study and hence encourage
participations and collaborations from different sectors of industries.
In this paper, a brief history of WWW is given in section (2). An overview of the technical
aspects in providing a WWW service is presented in section (3) in terms of computer
hardware requirements, software installation, network connections, application
maintenance and administration, and system security. Compared to most commercially
available multimedia software in the market, WWW services are cheap to run, userfriendly
and readily available to the public on the Internet. In order to exploit the potential
of WWW on transportation research, a study was carried out and results of the findings are
reported in section (4). To further substantiate the level of usefulness, two particular
WWW applications were chosen amongst other web services and they are reported in
section (5) for illustrative purposes. The selected applications are the 'Transportation
Resources on the Internet' developed in mid-1994 in the Institute for Transport Studies
(ITS) at the University of Leeds in England, and the 'Southern California Real-Time
Traffic Report' developed by Maxwell Laboratories, Inc. in collaboration with the
California State Department of Transportation in the US. Finally, a set of issues are raised
in section (6), highlighting the directions of future development of WWW as an easy-touse,
cheap and effective multimedia telematics application on transportation