The NMIS Project made specific achievements in the following three primary areas of focus:

Prototype Services: Developed prototype networked multimedia information services for K-12 education, continuing education and the health-care community and facilitated their earlier delivery, while also engaging service providers in the process of developing the underlying National Information Infrastructure (NII) required to deliver the services. (Discussed in Section 2.0)

The accomplishments of the Prototype Services component of the NMIS Project have included:

• Delivery of INTERNET CNN Newsroom, a daily multimedia news magazine and library available to the K-12 community on the Internet via the World Wide Web (WWW).

• Experiments using CAES content with a series of prototype educational models for providing continuing education services to science and technology professionals.

• Demonstration of the use of networks in health-care training with a prototype interactive multimedia program created by adapting "Preventive Medicine in the Combat Theater" (PMCT).

Technology and Support: Identified, developed and evaluated the broad spectrum of required technologies and support required for the successful delivery of networked multimedia information services using live, subscription, on-demand, and interactive service delivery models, and also analyzing local access technologies for high bandwidth connection to the National Information Infrastructure (NII). (Discussed in Section 3.0)

Key achievements of the Technology and Support component of the NMIS Project have included:

• Construction of the Network Services Operation Center (NSOC) to support NMIS Projects.

• Transmission of CAES seminars on the Internet in real-time using mutlicast technology.

• Implementation of a World Wide Web (WWW) accessible INTERNET CNN Newsroom Daily Multimedia Magazine and Video Library.

• Utilization of ScriptX to produce and deliver prototype LAN based interactive multimedia services deliverable via the WWW.

• Evaluation of scaleable distribution architectures to accommodate multimedia on the National Information Infrastructure (NII). These activities produced an integrated economic model for video on demand and video dialtone systems.

Standards and Policy: Facilitated the development of effective standards and policies for networked multimedia information services using the National Information Infrastructure (NII), including issues such as intellectual property rights, security, electronic commerce and interoperability. (Discussed in Section 4.0)

The main activities of the Standards and Policy component of the NMIS Project have included:

• Facilitation of the successful development of the SMPTE Header/Descriptor for video content.

• Exploration of the topics related to Internet commerce and economics, which initially focused around the examination implementation issues involved with NetBill, a Internet billing system developed at INI/CMU.

• Demonstration of how standards could work together to allow interoperability of the CMU Informedia Project and the NMIS INTERNET CNN Newsroom.

  In order to better understand both the activities of the NMIS project, as well as the structure of this report, it is useful to frame the NMIS accomplishments in terms of the types of activity (i.e. Prototype Services, Technology/Support and Policy/Standards) relative to the major cooperating organizations. Table 1 below illustrates these relationships, and in addition provides a guide to finding the information regarding particular initiatives within this report. Please note that in order for each of the individual sections of this report to provide enough information to stand alone, some information has been repeated across related sections.

Table 1: NMIS Activities Relative to Types of Activities and Participating Organizations, Including Location Within NMIS Final Report

In order to fully appreciate these contributions which are described in this report, it is helpful to keep the historical context of the project in mind at every turn. It may be hard now to remember how much the Internet has changed over the course of the NMIS Project. It is easy to take for granted that today we can interact with commercial news services with a Java-enabled browser by using a high speed cable modem. These things were only emerging potentials when NMIS began. If you look at the host of issues which are about to be successfully addressed, such as caching video servers, streaming digital video, and interoperable copyright and billing standards across competing industries, it is important to remember the degree to which they were not only accurately foreseen early in the NMIS project, but also actively addressed so that the solutions played a part in what is both available today, and even more importantly, what is about to become possible in the near future.[16]

The remainder of this report will provide a more detailed overview of the NMIS Project's accomplishments, further challenges which emerged during the project, recommendations on how these challenges maybe addressed in the future, and references to sources of further information about each of the activities.