KEYWORDS
Technology Assessment, Standardisation, Medical Multimedia, Computer Aided Education, Internet, Intranet, Distribution, CORBA, Multimedia Databases

INTRODUCTION
The design of medical educational material is a cost- and time-intensive compilation process. Due to mostly inhomogeneous computer networks within intra- and inter-hospital environments, platform independence and cross-system reusability of educational material is required. We concentrate our efforts on using Web technologies, which are low-cost and universally available, to support the collaborative development of educational material and its exploitation. In co-operation with medical and non-medical professions, widely available, general purpose packages are customised with the aim of avoiding the re-development of specific software environments from scratch.

WEB TECHNOLOGIES IN MEDICAL ENVIRONMENTS
Each new release of Web browsing software provides additional features regarding its capability to handle the variety of medical multimedia contents. The Netscape client software integrates the publication and viewing of richly formatted multimedia documents across the network, execution of software written in Java, and distribution of software using CORBA. Additionally, the Netscape Communicator incorporates communication software enabling conferencing, and collaborative browsing among the participants of the medical educational process. To realise an efficient storage and a net-wide access of the medical multimedia contents, existing multimedia database technologies and standard access methods (e.g. JDBC) have to be used.

COMPUTER AIDED LEARNING USING THE WEB
We use Web technologies to offer the remote access to educational material from any Internet entry point. The material composed of various multimedia data formats can be accessed by medical and non-medical personnel. The Web as an open system is extendable in order to incorporate new media and technologies. This fact, as well as the easy maintenance and further development of applications within student projects, diploma thesis and research projects targets the needs of the rapidly developing medical field.

COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT
The purpose of our current work is a technology feasibility study to show the perspectives of a step-by-step acquisition of medical contents and the development of applications for medical education in collaboration with all parties involved in the educational process. The standardised data formats allow the use and customisation of already available Web-contents, as well as the creation and provision of new documents which integrate existing contents. Object oriented methods intrinsically support the approach of collaborative development of applications. Through the publication of interfaces the initial development as well as the re-use of the components is supported.

DISTRIBUTION AND RE-USABILITY OF APPLICATIONS USING CORBA
Java enables Internet-wide utilisation of same applications. To increase the performance of Java-applications we use a client-server model, concentrating the computationally and data intensive processes on dedicated powerful hardware. We use the industry standard CORBA, which is able to distribute objects across the network as well as to separately manage implementations and interfaces, in order to realise object oriented client-server systems.

CONCLUSION
We concentrate our effort on utilisation of existing Web technologies for presentation and distribution of the educational information base, as well as for the communication among involved parties. This considerably accelerates the compilation process of the educational information base.

Correspondence:
Domagoj Cosic
Institute of Computer Graphics, FR 3-3,
Technische Universität Berlin,
Franklinstr. 28/29, D-10587 Berlin, Germany
email: domagoj(at)cs.tu(at)csrlin.de
bonjour(at)cs.tu-berlin.de
schaaf(at)cs.tu-berlin.de
http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/

Oral presentation at EuroPACS'98, Barcelona, Spain