Quality of Service Support for Multimedia Data on Internet -- Heterogeneous Data Integration with Mobile Information Managers -- A Scalable Video-on-Demand Server for a Dynamic Heterogeneous Environment -- Dynamic Skyscraper Broadcasts for Video-on-Demand -- Deciding Round Length and Striping Unit Size for Multimedia Servers -- Management and Rendering of Multimedia Views -- NETCICATS: Network-Conscious Image Compression and Transmission System -- ABR Service in ATM Networks: Performance Comparison Between BECN and Adaptive Stochastic Congestion Control Schemes with Guaranteed Minimum Cell Rate -- An Admission Control Framework for Applications with Variable Consumption Rates in Client-Pull Architectures -- Accurate Modelling of VBR Coded Video Sources in ATM Networks -- Retrieving Images by Content: The Surfimage System -- Weakly Constraining Multimedia Types Based on a Type Embedding Ordering -- Balancing Workload and Communication Cost for a Distributed Virtual Environment -- Network Visualization of Heterogeneous US Army War Reserve Readiness Data -- A Museum-Oriented Authoring Tool -- Modeling and Retrieving Audiovisual Information - A Soccer Video Retrieval System -- A Flexible Architecture for the Integration of Media Servers and Databases -- Sketch- Based Images Database Retrieval -- An Integrated Data Model and a Query Language for Content- Based Retrieval of Video -- Virtual Reality for Image Retrieval -- Trends in Visual Information Retrieval (Panel Description).

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mul timedia Information Systems (MIS’98) held in Istanbul, Turkey in September 1998. This workshop builds upon the success of the three previous workshops in this series that were held in Arlington, VA, West Point, NY, and Como, Italy. As in the past, this is a small focused workshop, consisting of participants drawn from a wide variety of disciplines (e. g. theory, algorithms, real time systems, networks, operating sys tems, graphics and visualization, databases, artificial intelligence, etc. ), all of which focus on research on one or more aspects of multimedia systems. The workshop program included 19 technical papers, three invited talks, and one panel. Of the technical papers 13 were accepted as regular papers and 6 as short con tributions. These papers cover a number of areas including: Multimedia storage system design Image storage and retrieval systems Quality of service considerations Networking support for multimedia information systems Distributed virtual environments Multimedia system architecture issues The invited talks were given by three experts well known for their work in this area. Satish K. Tripathi’s (University of California, Riverside) talk was on “Quality of Service Support for Multimedia Data on Internet”, Paul Emmerman (US Army Re search Laboratory) discussed “Visualizing the Digital Battlefield”, and Val Tannen (University of Pennsylvania) presented “Heterogeneous Data Integration with Mobile Information Manager”. The panel discussion, organized by Chahab Nastar of INRIA, France, addressed “Trends in Visual Information Retrieval.