In a digital library, these data objects are distributed in a wide area network. Retrieving large data objects in a wide area network has a high response time. We have conducted experiments to measure the communication overhead in the response time. We have studied the correlation between communication and size of data, between communication and type of data and the communication delay to various sites in a local and wide area network. We present different strategies for reducing delay while communicating multimedia data.
Images are amenable to losing data without losing semantics of the image.
Lossy compression techniques reduce the quality of the image and reduce the size leading to a lower communication delay. We compared the communication delay between compressed and uncompressed images and study the overhead due to compression and decompression. Finally, we present a framework for efficient communication of digital library data.