MHEG: an introduction to the future international standard for hypermedia object interchange

The MHEG group began as an ad-hoc group in early 1989 under the chairmanship of Mr Francis Kretz to address the coded representation of final form multimedia and hypermedia objects that will be interchanged across services and applications, by any means e.g. storage media, LAN, wide area telecommunication or broadcast networks. The “MHEG object” is intended to be a basic component in a wide range of International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Recommendations, ISO and other standards, and user defined architectures and applications. MHEG objects will play a federating role, enabling different applications to share the basic information resource. See Figure 1. The work has been assigned to the the ISO/IEC working group SC29/WG12 known as MHEG. The term “MHEG” is used for the working group, the future standard 13522, and the objects defined, but the use is usually clear from the context.