In the last few years multimedia hardware and applications have become widely available on PC and workstations. Moreover, through the tremendous development and the wide usage of the World Wide Web multimedia applications have been brought over the network to many people. This book presents the results of the fourth in a well established series of international workshops on Multimedia organized by the EUROGRAPHICS Association, and held from May 28 to 30, 1996, in Rostock, Germany. The workshop had the special topic Multimedia on the Net and was the follow up of the EUROGRAPHICS Symposium and Workshop on Multimedia held in Graz in June 1994. The workshop program consisted of an invited keynote speech and five technical sessions. The fifteen contributions selected for this volume treat topics of particular interest in current research and address actual problems of the use of multimedia in distributed applications over the network. According to the technical sessions they can be roughly structured in the parts concepts for handling multimedia data, still and motion pictures on the net, WWW and multimedia, collaborative multimedia, and multimedia and education. Concepts for handling multimedia data are addressed in two contributions. The first treats a frame based presentation model for distributed information systems (Kirste), the other one presents a temporal logic formalism for specifying navigational transformation in hypermedia applications (Mere et al.).
