Rapidly emerging technologies offer opportunities for broadening the scientific social and economic benefits of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) through new services. Many important societal benefits are outside the lucrative business areas private industry has targeted in current plans for commercial networked services. Building a stronger, more equitable national education system, particularly at the elementary and secondary level is one such vital national challenge. Another area is lifelong continuing education, particular for American workers in fast moving scientific and technical fields. Improvements in the U.S. health care system may represent the greatest challenge.

The success of network research programs will be measured by progress against these national challenges. In order to achieve the above goals, it will be critical to have models of how to deliver these services. Current technical measures such as backbone bandwidth (in bits per second), usage (in packets per month) and accessible networks will give way to criteria that reflect the network's contributions to the nation. New measures can include contributions to improved K-12 achievement scores, industrial competitiveness indicators and infant mortality rates. When this project began very little work had been done to engage American service and health care providers or an array of other groups who must participate in a truly national information infrastructure. The greatest national benefits will be realized by addressing the needs of users and services providers early, as opposed to the isolated development of network technology alone. Growth in network bandwidth and emerging network support for multimedia applications has created opportunities to develop and deliver multimedia services.

Accomplishments

The NMIS team has produced and delivered prototype digital multimedia information services nationwide via the Internet and emerging National Information Infrastructure (NII). The prototype services have included news and information for K-12 educators and students, professional science and technology education for scientists and engineers (including innovation management), and health information services for health care professionals.

The specific key achievements of the Prototype Services component of the NMIS Project have included the following:

• CAES/MIT and CECI/MIT in cooperation with TESI sponsored 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). CTPID/MIT cooperated with the project to produce evaluations of the costs and benefits of using networking technology in education.

• MIT/CAES experimented with a series of prototype multimedia information services representing a variety of educational models for providing continuing education services to science and technology professionals.

• Dartmouth/IML demonstrated the use of networks in health-care training with a prototype interactive multimedia program created by adapting "Preventative Medicine in the Combat Theater" (PMCT) for delivery on local-area networks (LAN).

Through these efforts, the NMIS Project successfully fostered the early production and delivery of services while also engaging service providers in providing valuable feedback for the further developments in network technology, infrastructure and policy development.

• 2.1 K-12 Education Information Services

• 2.2 Professional Education Information Services

• 2.3 Networked Interactive Multimedia Health Services

• 2.4 Future Directions in NMIS Services