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than one environment was to unify these two environments, which resulted in the
proposal of the WebbleWorld system in 2010 [5]. This paper will review the history
of meme media and give new perspectives of meme media and knowledge federation
technologies. Chapter 2 describes the origin of the idea about synthetic media
architecture. Chapter 3 will describe the reaction of industries, immediately after our
proposal of synthetic media, for applying this idea to the rapid development of client
systems. Chapter 4 will describe the counterbalancing reflection from the academic
side against such reactions by industries, and the resultant proposal of meme media
architectures. Chapter 5 will describe the new aspect of meme media called
improvisational knowledge federation to extract some functions from more than one
Web applications and/or Web services and to federate them to work together with
other meme media components for composing complex applications. Improvisational
knowledge federation based on meme media technologies has enabled us to
extensively utilize open Web resources including data sets, application tools and
services by making them interoperate with each other together with other meme
media tools. Chapter 6 will describe the Web-based meme media system
WebbleWorld which has successfully merged meme media architecture with Web
technologies. Chapter 7 and 8 will explain two new applications of WebbleWorld
both of which deal with big data and requires exploratory visual analytics of them.
One is the integrated IT support of the clinico-genomic trials on cancer, and deals
with clinical trial data, patient genomic data, and patient DICOM image files. The
other is the social cyber-physical system for the optimization of snow plowing and
removing in Sapporo, and deals with both retrospective and real time probe car data
and probe person data, meteorological sensor data, traffic accident records,
complaints from citizens, and snow plowing and removing operation records. Chapter
9 will give our future perspectives on meme media technologies in the context of
cloud computing and big data analytics.
2
Synthetic Media Architecture as the Origin
The history of meme media research started with the idea of synthetic media
architecture in 1987 and its implementation in Smalltalk 80 as IntelligentPad in 1989
[1]. The basic idea came from the observation that both multimedia documents and
visual tools like a hand calculator share the same type of composition structures on a
screen. Each of them has a base pad with a set of embedded pads on it. Each
embedded pad may again be a composite pad with a base pad and its embedded pads.
The first observation may conclude that there are also some difference between the
two, i.e., component pads of a tool may have some functions, while those of a
multimedia document have no functions. However, each component of a multimedia
document on a screen also has a function, like a text-editing function of an embedded
text pad, or an image-editing function of an embedded image. Therefore, we can
conclude that, from an architectural point of view, there are no difference between
multimedia documents and tools. Both consist of functional pads pasted together to
define nested structures which are purely hierarchical. The hierarchical structure
among component pads defines a parent-child relationship between a pad and another
pad embedded in it. These pads may interoperate with each other. For example, a
number button pad embedded in a calculator base pad sends its assigned one digit
