Resumen
The article reports that watermarking involves embedding data, often imperceptibly, into a media or multimedia object to enhance or protect its value. While the field is relatively new, many applications that could benefit from watermarking have already been proposed. The article also explores some ways the proposed applications might benefit from standards, as well as efforts now under way to develop a watermarking standard to protect digital video material. Three applications with similar technical requirements are identified as one uses watermarking to convey ownership information, another uses watermarking to verify that object content has not changed, and the third, called collaborative watermarking, conveys object-specific information to a community of recipients. Greatest needs and opportunities for watermarking standards involve invisible watermarking. Ownership and authentication application clusters often interact with encryption systems for watermark key management. Copy protection of digital video is a pioneering application of collaborative watermarking that has inspired a companion pioneering standards effort.

Resumen
Russia's palatial state Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg possesses many great collections including prehistoric art, antiquities, Western European art, and numismatics. This article reports the joint efforts of software company IBM Corp. and Hermitage, who began exploring the nature of museum information services that would best serve the museum, in 1997. Three end-user applications were identified for development , that would permit the Hermitage's collections to be searched and better experienced from afar. The multimedia based education programs were created to serve Hermitage visitors, especially children by providing interactive art education. The visitor information kiosks were created to help Hermitage visitors choose a set of holdings to visit and then navigate the museum in order to see them. The web site was created to serve remote patrons by familiarizing them with the Hermitage's holdings, its history, news, temporary exhibitions, and the visitors service it provides. The digital library enables the browsing and searching provided by the site. It generates dynamic pages for specifying browsing and search, execute the search, and prepares dynamic pages that presents the search results.