Elektronisk Tidning

The on-going development of computer networks, processing, and display capabilities as well as new types of software is providing new possibilities for distribution and presentation of information and related services. The Swedish Institute for Systems Development, SISU, is working in this area to develop a framework for highly interactive electronic information services in a distributed environment.

One of SISU's projects in this field is targeting the design and development of a daily interactive news service. It is well known that many electronic news services are provided today through various channels. On one hand, we have information providers using for instance CompuServe, Prodigy, and America On-line. These services are updated regularly, often in short intervals, but have an archaic layout consisting of text only. On the other hand, we have information providers using more sophisticated layout including multimedia elements such as images, sound, and video. However, the distribution channels and presentation techniques used by these services rarely allow for frequent updates.

An objective for the project is, thus, to develop a news service that allows sophisticated layout facilities as well as short intervals between editions. To accomplish this, the project is studying both tools, methods and organisation of the production and distribution processes.

Interactivity is considered as one of the key elements of an electronic information service. Especially, the possibility to communicate not only with personnel at the news service itself, but with other readers is attracting new groups of subscribers. The daily news service to be developed by this project is having strong requirements on interactivity. Examples of functionality considered for implementation are electronic mail, debate areas, individual selection of news material, and interactive shopping.

Additional target areas for the project include billing strategies, advertisements, and intuitive user interface and organisation of news material and services.

The implementation of the news service will mainly be based on commercially available software and hardware. The project has selected World Wide Web (WWW) including related protocolls and formats as platform. Native WWW has however poor support for interactive information services as described above. Thus, in order to improve the interactive aspects of the news service, the project has integrated the relational database management system Oracle 7 with WWW Servers. A true database system with high capacity is also enabling sophisticated automatic information management that is extremely important for low cost production and distribution of an interactive news service.

The project, which started in October 1994, presented a prototype in the end of June 1995. This version will be used during the next phase of the project for field studies involving a substantial number of test users including individuals at home, schools, and public libraries.

SISU is running the project in collaboration with a large Swedish daily news paper (Dagens Nyheter) as well as computer (Digital, Oracle) and telecom companies (Telia Promotor) and research institute (Institute for Media Technology).

Staff contact and project manager at SISU for this project is Ulf Wingstedt, ulf@sisu.se.