**************************

ITL hosts MPEG Web site

As of December 15, 2000, the Information Access Division (IAD) will be hosting the on-line Web site for the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of the International Organization for Standards (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).  The site was previously hosted by IBM for the past five years.  The new Web site was developed by Mike Rubinfeld of the Information Access Division and Steve Otto of the Information Services and Computing Division. Mike Rubinfeld is the Chair of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) L3 Technical Committee on Coding of Audio, Picture, Multimedia, and Hypermedia Information, which serves as the U.S. delegation to the ISO/IEC MPEG international standards bodies.

This data site will include working group documents, contributions from industry, experimental data and associated software, and output documents from the MPEG committee.  This will allow committee members to upload their contribution documents and share information and working documents during the standards development process.

Future plans for the MPEG Web site include providing a management information system to enable users to search and retrieve documents from the system, an automated document upload and register process, virus checking on incoming documents, ability to track membership and ad-hoc groups and dialogs, and allow individual passwords.

MPEG is the working group of ISO/IEC in charge of developing standards for coded representation of digital audio and video.  Established in 1988, this group has produced MPEG-1, the standard on which such products as Video CD and MP3 are based, MPEG-2, the standard on which such products as Digital Television set top boxes and DVD are based, and MPEG-4, the standard for multimedia for the web and mobility. The current focus is on MPEG-7 "Multimedia Content Description Interface" whose completion is scheduled for summer 2001.  Work on a new standard MPEG-21 "Multimedia Framework" started in June 2000 and has already produced a Draft Technical Report and two Calls for Proposals.  The new Web site is expected to help enable easier collaboration of the MPEG community in developing new standards.

CONTACT:  Mike Rubinfeld, ext. 3064