This volume is a record of the Workshop on Graphics and Communications organized within ESPRIT II Project 2463 ARGOSI (Applications Related Graphics and OSI Standards Integration). The workshop was included in the Eurographics workshop programme for 1990. The ARGOSI project essentially arose from the observation that international standards in the graphics and networking areas were generally being developed in isolation and that insufficient attention was being paid to the needs of applications whose requirements spanned several standards. The importance of the integration of graphics and networking has been growing over recent years, with the growth of interest in multi-media systems to support cooperative working, and the use of computer graphics techniques in the visualization of the results of scientific and engineering computations. The latter frequently involve high-speed links between workstations and supercomputers. The presentations in this volume cover a broad range of activities from a classification scheme for graphics and networking to interconnection experiments with broadband networks. Three topics were selected for detailed discussion in working groups: - Improvements to the computer graphics metafile standard, - The role of application profiles in graphics data exchange, - The impact of multi-media. The volume contains a record of the discussions and the recommendations from the working groups, subsequently endorsed by the workshop.

We have written this book principally for users and practitioners of computer graphics. In particular, system designers, independent software vendors, graphics system implementers, and application program developers need to understand the basic standards being put in place at the so-called Virtual Device Interface and how they relate to other industry standards, both formal and de facto. Secondarily, the book has been targetted at technical managers and advanced students who need some understanding of the graphics standards and how they fit together, along with a good overview of the Computer Graphics Interface (CGI) proposal and Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) standard in particular. Part I, Chapters 1,2, and 3; Part II, Chapters 10 and 11; Part III, Chapters 15, 16, and 17; and some of the Appendices will be of special interest. Finally, these same sections will interest users in government and industry who are responsible for selecting, buying and installing commercial implementations of the standards. The CGM is already a US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS 126), and we expect the same status for the CGI when its development is completed and it receives formal approval by the standards-making bodies.