Technical program

Middleware technologies like the Common Object Request Broker (CORBA) implementations, Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), and Java RMI have proved their suitability for "standard" client-server applications. Middleware abstracts from particular network services and allows application developers to focus on the application. However, it is well known in the research community, that today's middleware solutions are not suited for distributed multimedia systems, and do not provide the required levels of adaptation and configurability that is needed to accommodate the diversity of modern distributed multimedia applications. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry to identify why today's middleware technologies and standards fail to appropriately support multimedia applications and especially to discuss new requirements, approaches, and solutions.

Areas of interest for this workshop include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Experiences with middleware platforms in multimedia application domains
• The design and implementation of multimedia middleware platforms
• Performance analysis of multimedia middleware platforms
• Quality of Service and Realtime support in middleware platforms
• Stream support in middleware platforms
• Support for persistent multimedia objects
• Resolving heterogeneity in multimedia middleware platforms
• Services and APIs for multimedia application development (incl. security and management)