E TEL

Abstract

The ever-growing number of on-line multimedia services relating to application fields as diverse as commercial, entertainment, and educational fields calls for distributed information systems that help the end-user accessing available services. Most popular information systems, also qualified as resource discovery services, are those provided in the Internet such as the World-Wide Web (Www), which is becoming the dominant Internet Resource [4]. Other systems include those based on the use of private resources, which are aimed at ensuring qualitative access to the information.This paper discusses the design of a new distributed information system, called ETEL (Edition TELematique), that combines the advantages of the above approaches, i.e., we want to provide a system that gives access to a large number of services without sacrificing the services' quality. This paper is structured as follows. The next section outlines approaches to distributed information systems and is followed by an overview of the ETEL system in section 3. Section 4 addresses our work towards ensuring access quality in the ETEL system. Finally, we conclude in section 5, summarizing our work and giving the project status.