But distributed multimedia applications present various requirements which are not necessarily met by the services offered by standard communication protocols - or at least by the quality of service supplied by these protocols. The research projects who are involved in modelling work in close co-operation with the protocol research teams. Successive versions of RTP have been evaluated, which eventually led to the official standardisation of RTP by IETF on 25 January 1996. RTP is a protocol for the transmission of real-time audio and video data over the Internet. It was immediately adopted by numerous companies.
Major applications are in Internet telephony and video conferencing.
Numerous research problems remain open. The problem here is to devise tools to realise and easily edit sophisticated WWW documents. In addition, such documents have to be structured in such a way as to adapt them to co-operative work. A corresponding work environment must also be developed. Document models are studied which account at the same time for the documents' logical or abstract organisation, their graphical display and their contents.