Information technology is rapidly evolving into a continuous spectrum of tools and methods for the creation, delivery and presentation of information on a personal basis. Data processing, computer science, telecommunications, video, audio and media technology are converging into a standardized communications framework easily accessible to both organizations and individual users. The rapid developments in information technology have profound effects on human communication. Both personal communication and mass communication will change and adapt as a result of the emergence of new technologies. A new infrastructure will be created, giving everyone access to digital services.
The general trends are towards a digital world, where all types of information will be captured, processed and distributed digitally. Data, text, sound, images, animation, video and all their combinations will be communicated in digital form. The media landscape will become digital. New, electronic media will emerge and current media will have to accommodate and utilize the new tools in order to stay competitive.
Project:The printing and publishing industry is rapidly converging with electronic media, such as video, audio and telecommunications. News can easily and rapidly be accessed electronically through computer networks as soon as the news material (text, pictures, video and audio clips) has been edited into a suitable format.
In January 1994 a joint project with Aamulehti Yhtymä, a major finnish publishing house, and Helsinki University of Technology was launched to create a real network based electronic medium, ``net medium'' called OtaOnline.
The project is lead by professors Nils Enlund and Reijo Sulonen. The research team includes Janne Saarela, Marko Turpeinen, Tuomas Puskala, Mari Korkea-aho and Antti Louko. The project receives funding from TEKES.
HUT is responsible for the technical aspect of the project and the media company Aamulehti Group is responsible for the information production and journalistic touch of the project. That means contributing to the process of designing the contents, structure and usability of the electronic newspaper.
The goal of our electronic net media project, OtaOnline, is to provide a testbed for experimenting with the possibilities of the new media.
Technically, the main areas of interest in the project are
Not so technically, the main areas of interest are
OtaOnline will receive its news and articles from national and local news sources including Iltalehti and Kauppalehti and several local publications. OtaOnline will also include commercials presented in a completely new way.
OtaOnline will be freely (without any cost) accessible to all students and staff of the campus area, who will also contribute to the experiment by providing local campus related material. Also the organizations and companies working in Otaniemi area will have an access to the newspaper.
OtaOnline has been available as a weekly edition since December 1994, and then as a "daily" edition at the beginning of 1995. "Daily" in this context means that part of the material in the newspaper will change on a daily basis and some will remain for the whole week - or even longer.
A co-operative approach between newspaper publishing house and an academic research institute has proven successful. The content production for net medium requires new skills from both the editorial and the technical personnel. Many open computer scientific research issues are to be solved before a large-scale multimedia service can be provided. In this project, we have been able to combine different domains of knowledge to solve these problems in a fruitful way.