The Information Society presents major technological challenges some of which involve the development of entirely new processes and some that call for more creative and relevant applications of essentially existing technologies. We present an interdisciplinary research program at the University of Cyprus which purports to address the technological requirements of the Information Society. Current efforts in the program involve, firstly, the study of social opportunities that have descended directly from the current capabilities in Communication and Information technologies and, secondly, the implementation of a prototype system designed to support basic functions of the Information Society. In this paper we present the idea of an electronic road by first exploring the conditions that led to ists emergence. We then specify its role in the Information Society and finally we present and discuss the technological challanges that lie ahead before effective and functional electronic roads can be realized.

The urban landscapes-physical and social- of post industrial societies are rapidly transformed as we approach the new millenium. Our making sense of space, time, the social, the political, the urban and the rural, the private and the public are also deeply affected by this whirl-wind of change. To a significant extent, the development of communications and information technologies is central to this transformation and to all the functions that combine to make up contemporary cities ....and societies (1). In order to overcome social isolation (and societal compatibility with other technological advanced states) and achieve a society where most of the users can have access to information online, ERIS is trying to create such an opportunity (with strong educational targets, for school usage) which is a challange at the same time and deal with these above mentioned issues.

The work which has been done during the first year of the project was a fact finding nature and focuses specifically on gathering figures and answers through a set of qualitative research, namely, three questionnaires which were addressed between pupils, teachers and the entire population for the use of electronic media (information technology). ERIS is seeking, according to the aims of the project to take advantage of the recent developments in communication and information technologies in order to create the foundations of a system which incorporates the complex social and pedagogical requirements of the Information Society from the beginning at the design stage.

The rapid developments of the last few decades in Communication and Information Technologies have led to an increasing awareness of the widespread social implications of technology. It is currently acdcepted widely that information can usefully treated as a commodity within modern society. It is often thought of as a commodity of such central importance as to potentially influence the very nature of social life and civilization. The term Information Society represents the embodiment of this idea of an information-led reengineering of social functions and processes. An important prerequisite to the formation of any social group is the capability of jointly held objectives relies crucially on the ability of the group to exchange information and to depate. Traditionally, this requirement for communication is met when it is possible to meet frequently in person, within either a formal or an informal setting, in order to exchange information and discuss commonly recognized issues. For instance, the strong social fabric that underlines small communities is formed and subsequently maintained through continous gatherings in communal retreats, such as cafeterias, or in community events, such as fairs. The technological capability to communicate at a distance introduces the opportunity to create communities that are distributed in space and are not necessarily restricted to close proximity. Apart from the potential increase in the number of variety of active communities, communication at a distance introduces the possibility of altering the character of communities. Social groups can now be defined by the proximity in the type and nature of information in which their members have developed an interest. One can thus recognize the emergenceof thematic social groups which can now include members physically located in any region of the world. Thus, interests and intellect can ow shape the boundaries defining social groups rather than physical proximity and direct communication. Learning communities, thematic and discusssion groups are only some of the characteristic communities transcending physical space which have emerged as a direct result of the capability to communicate at a distance both effectively and quickly. The possibility of widesprad access to vast amounts of information is another technological capability of enormous promise which ahs emerged relatively more recently. For instance, open access to information in combination with distance communication together facilitate teleworking. Access to information can also help to strengthen the very foundations of modern society by enriching the political debate with data and evidence and by enhancing the democratic process of public accountability. These issues are particularly relevant for small societies such as Cyprus which has a fairly short tradition as a modern republic.

The recognition of the potential and implications of modern advancements in communication and information technologies automatically raises the isssue of what is needed to bridge the gap between expectation and reality. Undoubtedly, there are still major technological obstacles to be overcome and some equally daunting social hurdles to knowledge in a systematic way so that it can support open access in a meaningful manner has not yet been defined. The networking infrastructure and the human-machine interfacing of technoligical systems that support the social roles mentioned above aslo present significant challenges.

The purpose of this paper ist to present an interdisciplinary research program which aims to define the social implicationsof modern communication and information technologies and explore the technological advancements which are required for the implementation of the Information society within the Mediterranean region. The project is titled: ERIS. An overview of the structure of the project is given in the Figure 1. It addressses athe problem of bridging from the technoligical advancements to basic social functions. It involves a combination of fundamental and applied research which is designed to define and address the problem in a holistic manner. The project includes the development of a prototyper system which will initially draw on cultural and historical information in order to support a virtual journey through the Cypriot cultural heritage.

In the remainder of this paper we introduce the notion of electronic roads. In order to do this we first discuss the role of education in the Information Society. In a subsequent section we present the major technological challenges to electronic roads. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social relevance of the research program.

For centuries the industrial model has imposed its values on educational systems. Out of this influence has emerged a dominant emphasis on technical expertise: essentially educational systems everywhere are structured to stream people towards single areas of employment through an elaborate system that begins on humanitarian premises and increasingly leads towards greater vocational specialization. (2)

Recent trends in the economy, which tends to evidence the undelying shift towards the IS, have demonstrated abundantly that thais model of educational preperation is unsustastainable. The average person is expected to change at least seven jobs in their lifetime. Employers are increasingly subscribing to retraining and continous education programs in order to mold and nurture the expertise they require at any particular point in time. The same employers report looking for flexible people with basic numeracy, verbal, written and computer liateracies, demonstrated thinking, learning, problem solving and decision making abilities, as well as strengths in inter personal relations and ethical values (3). Education in the IS is required to reinvent itself in order to move away from its emphasis on expertise and center its attention on the development of thinking skills, openness and flexibility. New methodologies need to be formulated for developing metacognitive skills and decision and problem solving abilities. In return, the IS is increasingly in a position to provide the technological tools that will support and expedite this transition. The technological progress that has revolutionized the corporate world has now reached the point of maturity where it can be used to develop thinking and learning tools that will support the learner in gathering and analyzing information in order to construct meaning, resolve dilemmas and solve problems. At the same time it can be offer new tools in the hands of the educator so that they can modify the learning environment to best guide and support the active learner in thier atmpts to develop mental constructs and apply them in incrasingly elaborate ways (4). Communication media, data gathering, handling, analyzing and presentation software as well as modeling and simulation packages are a substantial first step in this direction. Given the fact that education, through whatever channels, can have a substantial and lasting influence on the nature and scope of future societies, it is of paramount importance that the technological gap that has haunted educational systems is rapidly overcome so that education can become an integral part of the IS. If this does not happen, education will function in ways to dampen and undermine the information revolution. In the opportune case, however, that the IS can offer appropriate and substantial support so that educational systems can rise to the challenge, it is possible that a new feedback loop will come in place so that education can produce the citizens who will be in a better position to function and further advance the IS.

The IS relies on open access to information for ist most basic functions. The structure of knowledge in this vast space of information is of crucial importance to its usability and hence to the effectiveness of modern society. Members of this society are characterized by flexibility, critical thinking skills and the ability to function in a continuously varying envrionment which requires constant retraining and lifelong learning. Social clustering is determined by shared interests and social contracts are routinely made and broken in a civil manner. Public procedures are characterized by openness and transparency. Public criticism is a matter of routine and open, mass meaningful political debate is characteristic of everyday life. Hence the available information needs to be structured in a manner that supports flexible learners, rather than experts, and people who are seeking opportunities for continous learning. Cyperspace, the giant information bank, can be thought of as a universal biolectronic environment which extends everywhere there are telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines or electromagnetic waves. It is inhabited by an ecosystem of klnowledge (including incorrect ideas, for instance)n and is connected to the physical environment through ports which allow users to add, alter and reorganizing knowledge. Within cyberspace, the electronic road system can be thought of a virtual web that facilitates a self-selected and self-guided journey through the knowledge structure. It is typically an interactive environment that incorporates multimedia information handling and reorganization capabilites. It funtions as a social medium of exploration, investigation, just-in-time learning and documentation. As such, it can support a wide variety of social functions ranging form parliamentary debate to commerce and trade.

An electronic road might take the form of a navigation path through a multimedia environment. It would be an interactive environment that incorporates multimedia information handling and reorganization tools. It would offer the user the capability and opportunity to retrive, use, aler and modify information in order to meet the demands of the task that they are engaged in. This particular metaphor probably invokes the greatest technological requirements and is particularly useful for a prototype system such as ours, which partly aims to contribute to the preservation of cultural and historic heritage within the Mediterranean region. However, the electronic road can also take the form of a decision making process which begins with an investigation of relevant information and the collection of similar dillemas and alternative solutions and proceeds by defining the boundary conditions and local constraints. This particular metaphor is concluded by carrying out a series of "what if" scenarios that reveal potential advantages and disadvantages to a small number of satisfactory solutions. A fully operational electronic roads system would support these and a multitude of other metaphors that serve to provide the infrastructure for a variety of social functions and tasks.

In this section we describe in greater detail the technological implementation of an electronic road system. The overall technological design of such a system has been concieved at three conceptual levels:

(1) The top level is effectively the one a user communicates with. It is a Multimedia based environment able to provide sophisticated funtionality which will enable a user to travel through the electronic roads. The user will also be able to express a variety of constraints associated with some query such a Quality-of-Service Requirements, types of media the required information should be presented in, maximum cost of retrieving the required information, etc. Furthermore, the system itself will function as a distributed interlligent agent and will adapt a user´s query and the underlying apparatus´response with respect to such issues as a system performance, the user´s profile, etc.

(2) The middle part comprises those entities which form in distributed fashion the whole framework. These entities are typically dedicated data or media servers such as devices for cupturing and/or presenting various types of media, digital libraries, databases, etc. At this level we also have the formation of the metacomputing environment.

(3) The bottom port consists basically of the communication component and is responsible for addressing the issues related to high bandwidth networks.

The network component may consist of interconnected homogeneous networks. That is, prior to the wide deployment of the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN), it may consist of, for example Local Area Networks (LANs) based on different technologies (e.g. Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI, DQDB, ATM), the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), Cellular Mobile Telephone Network, satellite links, Noarrowband-ISDN, and even Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Each one of these networks has been designed (and optimized) to cater for different services (consisting of different media, such as: voice, data, TV, and multimedia). Each service may have its own needs. This in turn imposes different (sometimes conflicting) requirments on the network. As for the underlying network, at one end of the spectrum, we have networks such as the PSTN designed to carry voice services with a known QoS,or LANs designed to carry bursty traffic efficiently, but offering no QoS guarantees. At the other end of the spectrum, we have Broadband-ISDN (ATM is the chosen transport technology) designed to carry multiservice and mulitmedia traffic with a known(guaranteed by the network) QoS. The interconnection of these networks raises additional problems with regard to the transfer of mixed (multimedia) services through the heterogenous mix of networks. Note that even when the network is homogenous, effective control and management of these networks is still an open issue (5). Selecting an "optimal route" to interconnect two communicating parties can be a difficult (even NP complete) optimization problem ().

Based on the information provided by the query agent, which includes the QoS, and cost constraints, the Connection Admission Control (CAC) and routing control functions of the network management, will attempt to route (7) the request through the "most appropriate" path to the digital library that can serve the request. (Note that the request need not be sent to one library only-many libraries may need to cooperate in order to optimize the response to the query.) Once a route is selected, the query agent is sent along that route to the destination. On route, the agent gathers information about the network elements (and their state), so that it can build the (dynamic) networking profile. Once it arrives at the digital library, the user profile and the networking profile may be used to optimize the response due to the query(e.g. based on the user profile, the appropriate medium can be selected but with a view also to the capabilities of the selected network profile for the particular route chosen). If the media chosen satisfies the user and network profile then is all well. Otherwise, renegotiation, at each level may be necessary. For example, the digital library may respond with a request to renegotiate user and network profiles. The CAC and routing control function at the edge of the network will receive this request, and attempt to find an alternative route, it possible to satisfy, the new offered media. If no other route can be found, then the renegotiation query will be sent to the user and renegotiate the user profile.

Our specific interest in the development of digital libraries is concerned with the development of a media profile module consisting of three sub-modules, the media broker, the intelligent media retrieval sub-module, and the digital library. More specifically:

The media broker provides the inerface between the media profile and the networking and user´s profiles. It handles the requests of the user´s profile subject the networking profile constraints as well as to the digital library media availability and characteristics. Its target is to offer the best possible service, satisfying the user´s requests. For example, a retrieved object of high quality video can be highly compressed to achieve its transmission through a low bandwidth network. The mode of protocol behaviour of the media broker will be prescribed following multiple strategies of evolutionary programming bsed on multi-objective constraint optimization criteria.

The information retrieval sub-module facilitates the efficient location and retrieval of a variety of multimedia heterogenous data, including video, image, photographs, sound, speech and text. A multi-feature / multi-classifier strategy will be implemented for the retrieval of video, images, sound and speech. Features based on teh time domain, frequency domain, and time-frequency domains will be extracted. These feutures will be fed to multiple statistical and neural classifiers which will be asked to place their vote to a voting scheme. The voting scheme, provides the outcome of the decisioin making process for teh availability of the media-service requested.

The digital library provides the capture, compression and storage of digital data. Moreover, image and video enhancement takes place, as the need arises, through digital image processing.

The amalgamation of the various resources (multimedia environments, software programs, dedicated servers and other devices, etc. ) in a unified manner effectively amounts to the provision of a metacomputing environment- a coherent framework for utilizing the computational resources available on distributed heterogenous networks. The metacomputing environment would allow users to query the information roads system, search and retrieve needed information. It would also allow developers to expand the system by "plugging in" additional components as the latter become available. All this activity will take place in a coherent manner, where geographical distribution, platform dependencies, pre- and post- processing and filtering of information, are made transparent.

A suitable paradigm for developing the distributed metacomputing environment is the coordination paradigm (8) which separates communication from computation and is sufficiently expressive to describe the dynamic nature of communication among a multitude of independent and distributed agents.

Electronic Roads can be thought of as the underlying fabric of the space of information and the IS at large. They shape this space and define a novel way of acquiring, using and exchanging information which ultimately can result in new social links between the users of these roads. The very existence of electronic roads defines a knowledge structure wihtin cyberspace that permits a user to:

* explore the information space in a natural and self selected sequence where the information offered remains continously useful and interesting,

* adapt his/her exploration mode according to personal preferences both at the start and during the journey,

* learn new information, particularly new relevant associations of her/his original domain of interest with other domains,

* offer and restructure as well as take information along his/her route.

It is important that electronic roads include multiple flexible features of pedagogical value, such as interactivity tools, modeling and simulation environments, information analysis and synthesis tools as well as training packages. In this manner the necessary flexibility that is required by the inherent complexity in the applications can materialize, build in by design from the beginning. Our project seeks to take advantage of the recent developments in Communication and Information Technologies in order to create the foundatioins of a system which incorporates the complex social and pedagogical requirments of the IS. Electronic Roads can be envisioned in various forms and at various levels. However, at any level they tend to define the connections between classes of information, thereby lending structure to an information system and influencing its usefulness and usability. The notion of electronic roads can potentially have enormous implications on the organization of the Information Society.

This project has been funded by a University of Cyprus Research Grant (ERIS) and supported by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Education and Culture, the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority and the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation.

(4) The creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Information Society. Communication, Education and Training Research, Ministerial Decleration, Rome EC, 1996

(5) Papadopoulos, G. A. and Arbab, F. Coordination Models and Languages. Adavances in Computers, Academic Press. Vol.46. 1997 (forthcoming)