Abstract
The development of Internet technologies and computer devices make it possible to move
communication space from the real world to virtual worlds. Thus, there is an increasing need
for virtual communication or virtual collaboration tools which enable users to communicate
or work with others in virtual space wherever and whenever. In this paper, we propose an
Internet-based virtual collaboration system supporting multimedia presentation. The
proposed system provides two main functions. One is a content authoring function for
creating multimedia presentation and the other is a virtual collaboration function for offering
conferences that helps users exchange their opinions. The authoring function uses
Synchronous Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) that integrates and synchronizes
media objects such as text, images, and video. While making a multimedia content, text or
drawing can be used as annotations over images in layered architecture. In virtual
collaboration, users can use digital images and spatial data elements which are used to
represent users’ opinions and areas of interest in images. From conferences, users’ opinions
along with coordinate information can be stored into XML database using Unstructured
Information Management Architecture (UIMA).