Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

Broadly speaking, the main application domain of our research is the web and its numerous applications. This includes the recent evolutions of the web, with a special attention paid to the mobile web, the multimedia web, and the web of applications. The goal of our research is to enable new multimedia applications that can be deployed easily on the web, taking advantage of the existing infrastructure and the basic web technology.

The web is used for a very wide variety of applications, but the applications we have developed recently are more specifically targeted towards educational needs. The software we make available to the community helps teachers and students to benefit from the most recent advances in web technology. In the european project Palette (see section 8.2.1 ), for instance, we have created such applications based on both the LimSee3 platform and the Amaya web editor.

For our work on interactive audio, the application domains we address are video games and audio guides. Regarding video games, we focus on ``serious games'' which may have an educational and social impact when they are used in the area of culture or health. The goal of audio guides is to help people to move around in a city, with the goal of bringing autonomy to people with disabilities, for instance to people who are blind.

Work on XML processing is related to one of the foundations of web architecture, resource representation. As such, it applies to a large part of web technology, be it used on the web or in other settings. At the moment, it has strong connections with researches in other area of computer science: data bases and programming languages, where XML structures play an increasingly important role.