Members

Michel Banâtre, Boris Charpiot, Valérie Issarny, Michel Le Nouy

Motivations and objectives

The ever-growing number of on-line multimedia services relating to application fields as diverse as commercial, entertainment, and education calls for distributed information systems that help the end-user accessing available services. Most popular information systems, also qualified as resource discovery services, are those provided in the Internet such as the World-Wide Web, which is becoming the dominant Internet Resource. However, the searching process is burdened by the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet whose performance is questionable at peak hours. Furthermore, the relevance of the information varies from one server to another. In order to provide qualitative access to on-line services, proprietary information systems using private resources have been developed.

Our research aims at providing an information system that combines the advantages of the above approaches, i.e. we want to provide a system that gives access to a large number of services without sacrificing the services' quality. The resulting system is called ETEL (Edition TELématique) and relies on a newspaper-based solution. More precisely, the entry point of ETEL is an electronic newspaper service from which the user has access to the usual content of a newspaper as well as to a set of plugged-in interactive multimedia services that are either ETEL or Internet-provided.

Contributions

The ETEL newspaper service. The electronic newspaper service is developed in close collaboration with a local newspaper editor. Our goal in the design of an electronic newspaper is to provide a service with the following features:

• Coupled production of paper and electronic editions, i.e. production of the two versions from the same data,
• Presentation of the information that combines the advantages of both the paper version and the electronic support (see a sample 141K), and
• Integrated view of newspaper-based information and links to services.

Addressing Quality of Service requirements. The electronic newspaper service allows to meet the requirement of information quality for distributed information systems. Those systems have additional requirements relating to the access quality such as responsiveness, scalability and availability. We are investigating end-to-end solutions to the above requirements, i.e., we are devising dedicated solutions at the levels of both ETEL's clients and servers.

Application domains

For years, Solidor group has been working in the framework of local distributed client-servers systems. Some original and convincing results have emerged especially related to performance and fault-tolerance. Although these solutions, obtained in the context of a local-area network, can not be applied directly to Internet, they provide a reliable basis to work on the performance of Internet services.
Our research in this area has led to the development of an electronic newspaper Etel. This application provides readers with an electronic version of a newspaper, possibly personnalized and readable on a personnal reading support. The following issues have been addressed (i) quality of presentation with respect to the paper version, and benefiting from electronic capacities. (ii) access time to electronic information that must be equivalent to the time needed to access information in a real newspaper and finally the potentisl interaction that can be initiated between the reader and the electronic newspaper depending on the reading habbits of users. The goal of the first prototype, operational since october 1996, was to demonstrate the automatic generation of electronic editions from the current database of the newspaper. The second prototype, just operational integrates the remote access of the service by users as well a guaranteed access time for a restricted number of clients. The third prototype will demonstrate the scalability of our approach by considering a large number of clients.

Publications

• Michel Banâtre, Valérie Issarny, and Frédéric Leleu. ETEL: A Newspaper-Based Distributed Informations System. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop: Systems Support for Worlwide Applications, Connemara, Ireland, September 1996 (to appear).
  You can download its postscript version (613K).

• Michel Banâtre, Valérie Issarny, Frédéric Leleu, Boris Charpiot. Providing Quality of Service over the Web: A Newspaper-based Approach. In Proceedings of the 6th International World Wide Web Conference, Avril 1997, Santa Clara, USA.
  You can read the html version (224K).