Media Engineering

Drawing on the authors' involvement with Encarta, the "ground-breaking" electronic encyclopedia, this book explains how to go about building volumes of assorted information into a coherent resource for wide ranges of users. There are many examples of information systems that allow the user to discover what they need to know, about subjects as diverse as dinosaurs and distributed computing, systematically and intuitively, and even more that don't. The basic thesis of the book is that the core problems of designing multimedia information are amenable to the same concepts and disciplines that have been devised in software engineering. Furthermore it is not the technology of multimedia (CD-ROM, Internet etc.) but the systematic structuring of information that really matters. This concept provides the focus for the problem-solving approach of the text.