Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9.1 Introduction
Through the centuries human society has evolved a long way and presently,
along with product manufacturing, services, and information are playing
more and more important roles. Indeed, in the postindustrial society, funda-
mental knowledge is highly valued and considered an asset, often surpassing
practical know-how and technical skills. Since the 1970s, information
processing technologies have brought fundamental changes in the way
societies work. Creation, dissemination, and employment of information are
now vital for all economic, political, and cultural activities. An information
society [1], with information as a primary commodity, has emerged and
access, creation, and dissemination of information have been affirmed as
fundamental human rights.
Since the invention of typography, printed materials have been and still
remain one of the most common means for information dissemination. Well-
defined publishing procedures and copyright laws govern production, distri-
bution, and access to books, magazines, and newspapers. Worldwide library
networks archive printed documents and manage and make accessible the
heritage of accumulated human knowledge. Obviously, printed materials can
only capture and preserve static information, leaving out live music, voices,
and video. For the latter, however, the new digital multimedia has opened
virtually unlimited possibilities. Presently, many libraries are gradually shift-
ing from paper-based archival to digitization of documents and management
of digital records, e-books, and online information services [2]. Nevertheless,
we believe that paper is here to stay for quite a while. Due to the aggressive
policies of current publishers, the existing vast paper-based information
sources are actually increasing at very high rates. Many cultural issues and
traditions are also favoring paper and in fact there are still many people who
prefer to use printed materials rather than computer screens.
In our attempt to bring together the best of both worlds, we propose
a new pervasive infrastructure for integration and mixed use of printed
and digital information. Our approach is based on enhancement of new
and exiting publishing content in printed or digital form with visible or
invisible (for the human eyes) codes. We envisage a ubiquitous environment
of code recognition enabled devices that perform a diversity of actions
based on the codes and thus bring a new enhanced functionality of the
printed materials.
In Sections 9.2 and 9.3, traditional and electronic newspapers, cross-media
linking, and the newsputer concept are considered. In Section 4, we describe a
software environment for printout code attachment, management and linking
to corresponding functions or pieces of information. In Sections 9.5 and 9.6,
some details of the environment implementation and related experiments are
provided. Section 9.7 is dedicated to active knowledge and semantic surfaces,
and finally in Section 9.8 our vision for future works is outlined.
