Atul Puri

On feasibility of MPEG-4 for multimedia integration for e-commerce

First, we review the notion that Web-based business applications are being required to become increasingly sophisticated in the use of multimedia, although HTML-based Web browsers only offer limited multimedia capabilities. This leads us to briefly introduce MPEG-4, which offers improved capabilities for multimedia integration, and MPEG-7, which promises improved multimedia retrieval. Then, we discuss the general application area of e-commerce, that could potentially benefit from improved multimedia integration. Next, we discuss the key capabilities of MPEG-4 supported by the extended MPEG-4 browser that we employ to test multimedia integration for our e-commerce application. Next, we present e-travel, a fictitious e-commerce travel agent example application that we have developed to investigate the feasibility of MPEG-4 for multimedia integration. Finally, we discuss potential problems and prospects in migration of our example e-commerce application to a client/server framework.