HyperTree: a structural approach to web authoring

The expansion of the World Wide Web (WWW) has created an increasing need for tools capable of supporting WWW authors in composing documents using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Currently, most web authors use tools which are basically ordinary text editors and have additional features to facilitate the easy and correct use of HTML tags. This approach places the burden on the web author to design and then create the entire web site in a top-down fashion, without any explicit support for the structural design of the site. In this paper we discuss an alternative structural approach to Web authoring, which is based on the use of the HyperTree hypermedia system as the central authoring tool. The advantages of using HyperTree are two-dimensional. Firstly, web authors can manage a web site as a single complete hypermedia database. For example, HyperTree provides facilities like the automatic creation of indices and the discovery of link inconsistencies. Additionally, it organizes the web pages in an easy to understand hierarchy without using any HTML directly. Secondly, web end-users can benefit from the use of HyperTree, since seeking information in structured web sites is generally less disorientating and develops fewer cognitive overheads. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

WESONet: Applying semantic web technologies and collaborative tagging to multimedia web information systems

The publication of different media types, like images, audio and video in the World Wide Web is getting more importance each day. However, searching and locating content in multimedia sites is challenging. In this paper, we propose a platform for the development of multimedia web information systems. Our approach is based on the combination between semantic web technologies and collaborative tagging. Producers can add meta-data to multimedia content associating it with different domain-specific ontologies. At the same time, users can tag the content in a collaborative way. The proposed system uses a search engine that combines both kinds of meta-data to locate the desired content. It will also provide browsing capabilities through the ontology concepts and the developed tags.     

A Scalable Toolkit for Designing Multimedia Authoring Environments

This paper introduces Kaomi, a scalable toolkit for designing authoring environments of multimedia documents. The underlying concept is to provide the designer of multimedia applications with a fast method to get an authoring system based on a set of synchronized views (the presentation view for displaying the document, the scenario view for showing the temporal organization of the document, ...) so that each view is the support of editing actions. Kaomi is flexible enough to support a variety of multimedia documents declarative formats. It is indeed a scalable toolkit since it provides facilities for extending and/or for modifying the resulting authoring environment. In addition, cross-platform portability is provided which allows operation in the heterogenous Internet environment. The use of Kaomi is mainly described through the design of two authoring environments: one for authoring a sub-set of the Smil standard of the W3C and the other one for Madeus, a constraint based multimedia language.     

Towards an easy to use authoring tool for interactive non-linear video

With growing bandwidths in the Internet and seemingly unlimited storage capacities on web servers, media became more and more important in the daily use of the World Wide Web. While about ten years ago only text and images with small file sizes (and as a result small resolutions) could be used, it is possible to watch high quality multimedia presentations nowadays. But those rarely exist because of tedious to learn authoring tools. A specialization to one main medium, in our case video, allows creating efficient authoring tools using well known paradigms. This work introduces an authoring tool called SIVA Producer. An iterative process for improving the usability of the authoring tool is described. Furthermore, a distinction of the terms “interactive video”, “annotated video”, “non-linear video” and “hypervideo” is given.     

Supporting interactive presentation for distributed multimedia applications

In this paper we present IMP, a platform to support the authoring and run-time management of interactive multimedia applications in distributed environments. The multi-level platform model encourages slot-in extensibility to cater for the evolving environment. We illustrate with our prototype platform built above the Cambridge multimedia environment. The authoring model emphasises reusability, tailorability and use of environment features in a uniform way. We have shown the validity of our approach by constructing a variety of application types.     

Context aware guidance for multimedia authoring: harmonizing domain and discourse knowledge

This paper presents an approach to assist authors during the authoring of multimedia presentations. We extend the existing authoring support by integrating processes of topic identification, content collection and discourse structure building in a single environment. This integration allows identification of the context of the authoring process. Our approach combines this process context awareness with explicit domain and discourse knowledge to steer system suggestions. We evaluate our approach with an experimental system prototype.     

Assessment and multimedia authoring – a tool for externalising understanding

Abstract Multimedia authoring software has a number of features that, given teacher support, should provide conditions that help pupils create material that genuinely reflects their understanding. This paper reviews the ways in which use of this technology may also support improvements in assessment. Drawing on research findings it describes how pupil-produced multimedia documents can reveal aspects of performance that traditional tests may not recognise. If such assessment is to be accepted at the policy level, a shared set of criteria for achievement must be developed in terms of technical manipulation and content exposition. Lines of enquiry for further investigation of multimedia authoring, pupil learning and assessment are proposed.     

Crowdsourcing authoring of sensory effects on videos

Human perception is inherently multi-sensorial involving five traditional senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. In contrast to traditional multimedia, based on audio and visual stimuli, mulsemedia seek to stimulate all the human senses. One way to produce multi-sensorial content is authoring videos with sensory effects. These effects are represented as metadata attached to the video content, which are processed and rendered through physical devices into the user’s environment. However, creating sensory effects metadata is not a trivial activity because authors have to identify carefully different details in a scene such as the exact point where each effect starts, finishes, and also its presentation features such as intensity, direction, etc. It is a subjective task that requires accurate human perception and time. In this article, we aim at finding out whether a crowdsourcing approach is suitable for authoring coherent sensory effects associated with video content. Our belief is that the combination of a collective common sense to indicate time intervals of sensory effects with an expert fine-tuning is a viable way to generate sensory effects from the point of view of users. To carry out the experiment, we selected three videos from a public mulsemedia dataset, sent them to the crowd through a cascading microtask approach. The results showed that the crowd can indicate intervals in which users agree that there should be insertions of sensory effects, revealing a way of sharing authoring between the author and the crowd.

     

Canonical processes for creating personalized semantically rich multimedia presentations

Authoring of multimedia content can be considered as composing media assets such as images, videos, text, and audio in time, space, and interaction into a coherent multimedia presentation. Personalization of such content means that it reflects the users’ or user groups’ profile information and context information. Enriching the multimedia content with semantically rich metadata allows for a better search and retrieval of the content. To actually create personalized semantically-rich multimedia content, a manual authoring of the many different documents for all the different users’ and user groups’ needs is not feasible. Rather a (semi-)automatic authoring of the content seems reasonable. We have analyzed in detail today’s approaches and systems for authoring, personalizing, and semantically enriching multimedia presentations. Based on this analysis, we derived a general creation chain for the (semi-)automatic generation of such content. In this paper, we introduce this creation chain. We present our software engineering support for the chain, the component framework SemanticMM4U. The canonical processes supported by the creation chain and SemanticMM4U framework are described in detail. We also provide an explicit mapping of SemanticMM4U framework components to the processes and argue for the benefits of defining canonical processes for creating personalized semantically rich multimedia presentations.     

Authoring of scalable multimedia documents

With the diversity of usage conditions affecting the consumption of multimedia content, the adaptation of dynamic and interactive multimedia presentations is essential. The challenge consists in allowing a multimedia presentation to adapt in all its dimensions: spatially, temporally and interactively, without lessening its attractiveness and still giving the author the control over adapted versions. Additionally, the authoring of adaptable content should not increase the complexity of authoring. To address this challenge, we propose to transpose the concept of scalability to the world of multimedia documents by introducing the so-called Scalable MSTI model. In this paper, we show the properties of this model and how, from an authoring point of view, scalable multimedia documents can be created to address a wide range of usage conditions.     

ZYX-a multimedia document model for reuse and adaptationof multimedia content

Advanced multimedia applications require adequate support for the modeling of multimedia content by multimedia document models. More and more this support calls for not only the adequate modeling of the temporal and spatial course of a multimedia presentation and its interactions, but also for the partial reuse of multimedia documents and adaptation to a given user context. However, our thorough investigation of existing standards for multimedia document models such as HTML, MHEG, SMIL, and HyTime leads to us the conclusion that these standard models do not provide sufficient modeling support for reuse and adaptation. Therefore, we propose a new approach for the modeling of adaptable and reusable multimedia content, the Z_YX model. The model offers primitives that provide-beyond the more or less common primitives for temporal, spatial, and interaction modeling-a variform support for reuse of structure and layout of document fragments and for the adaptation of the content and its presentation to the user context. We present the model in detail and illustrate the application and effectiveness of these concepts by samples taken from our Cardio-OP application in the domain of cardiac surgery. With the Z_YX model, we developed a comprehensive means for advanced multimedia content creation: support for template-driven authoring of multimedia content and support for flexible, dynamic composition of multimedia documents customized to the user's local context and needs. The approach significantly impacts and supports the authoring process in terms of methodology and economic aspects     

A hypermedia authoring tool for augmented and virtual reality

Most existing hypermedia authoring systems are intended for use on desktop computers. These systems are typically designed for the creation of 2D documents and therefore employ 2D authoring mechanisms. In contrast, authoring systems for nontraditional multimedia/hypermedia experiences for 3D virtual or augmented worlds focus mainly on creating separate media objects and embedding them within the user's surroundings. As a result, linking these media objects to create 3D hypermedia is a tedious manual task. To address this issue, we present an authoring tool for creating and editing linked 3D hypermedia narratives that are interwoven with a wearable computer user's surrounding environment. Our system is designed for use by authors who are not programmers, and allows them to preview their results on a desktop workstation, as well as with an augmented or virtual reality system.     

多媒体结构的设计与选择

构造一个上下文敏感,具有可交互性的多媒体表示远比单纯构造视听信息或者单纯构造文本信息复杂得多.多媒体对象之间的交互需要有一个用来同步和异步交互的,包括立即响应的时空关系组织起来.根据构造环境的需要来考虑多媒体的结构构造.先通过介绍影响多媒体结构构造的7个要素来认识多媒体,然后在4种典型的构造模式中进行多媒体环境的选择.这4种构造模式分别是:结构化、时间关系、图关系、脚本形式.通过各种各样的观察和分析发现,结构化的多媒体构造为多媒体的表示提供了最为有效的表示形式.     

Modeling, authoring and formatting hypermedia documents in the HyperProp system

This paper discusses multimedia and hypermedia modeling, authoring and formatting tools, presenting the proposals of the HyperProp system and comparing them to related work. It also highlights several research challenges that still need to be addressed. Moreover, it stresses the importance of document logical structuring and considers the use of compositions in order to represent context relations, synchronization relations, derivation relations and task relations in hypermedia systems. It discusses temporal and spatial synchronization among multimedia objects and briefly presents the HyperProp graphical authoring and formatting tools. Integration between the proposed system and the WWW is also addressed.     

MediaTouch: A Native Authoring Tool for MHEG-5 Applications

MediaTouch is a visual based authoring tool for creating MHEG-5 applications. It is based on the native approach, which enables the author to operate at the level of MHEG-5 objects, in order to get the most out of the standard's features. Specialized editing functions facilitate the author's work, especially when setting properties such as the hierarchical structure of an application, dynamic behavior and appearance of objects. The paper introduces the problem of authoring multimedia applications, motivating the adoption of a standard solution, and explaining the functionality of MediaTouch, and in so doing, providing an example of use.     

基于多Agent的分布式多媒体协同创作环境DMCAE

Agent的许多良好特性和分布式对象技术的发展,使分布式多媒体系统的应用成为可能,尤其是网络技术的发展为分布式多媒体协作提供了保障。文章首先介绍了Agent的基本概念与系统结构,然后结合多Agent的分布式多媒体协同创作环境DMCAE的研究工作,论述了DMCAE的构建、总体结构、功能和特点,着重讨论了系统的协作性和互操作性。并以声卡插件为例,阐述了分布式多媒体协同创作的过程。     

User-author centered multimedia building blocks

The advances of multimedia models and tools popularized the access and production of multimedia contents: in this new scenario, there is no longer a clear distinction between authors and end-users of a production. These user-authors often work in a collaborative way. As end-users, they collectively participate in interactive environments, consuming multimedia artifacts. In their authors’ role, instead of starting from scratch, they often reuse others’ productions, which can be decomposed, fusioned and transformed to meet their goals. Since the need for sharing and adapting productions is felt by many communities, there has been a proliferation of standards and mechanisms to exchange complex digital objects, for distinct application domains. However, these initiatives have created another level of complexity, since people have to define which share/ reuse solution they want to adopt, and may even have to resort to programming tasks. They also lack effective strategies to combine these reused artifacts. This paper presents a solution to this demand, based on a user-author centered multimedia building block model—the digital content component (DCC). DCCs upgrade the notion of digital objects to digital components, as they homogenously wrap any kind of digital content (e.g., multimedia artifacts, software) inside a single component abstraction. The model is fully supported by a software infrastructure, which exploits the model’s semantic power to automate low level technical activities, thereby freeing user-authors to concentrate on creative tasks. Model and infrastructure improve recent research initiatives to standardize the means of sharing and reuse domain specific digital contents. The paper’s contributions are illustrated using examples implemented in a DCC-based authoring tool, in real life situations.     

Spatial reasoning about multimedia document for a profile based adaptation

The continuous evolution of smart devices has led to serious limitations in multimedia applications. The multimedia graphic design and animation and the increased use of rich and complex multimedia content on the web or other media have all created a need to diversify the accessibility of the content. Therefore several techniques are used today to design a universally accessible content. The main techniques that are still used to maintain accessibility is to create two parallel streams of design and development of the same content. Thus, the continuous evolution will certainly lead to create other streams. For this, the automatic reasoning on multimedia to allow a computer to modify the design according to different variables, devices capabilities, user status and context to provide personalized adapted content. In this paper, we propose an abstract document model called XMS short for XML Multimedia Specification; it describes the composition of an original multimedia document and can be extended to any document type. We present how we may use spatial information present in this document to adapt and modify the original document. We mainly focus on the spatial aspect of a web document, a combination of RCC8, qualitative distances, and directions are used to describe the layout of a set of objects. The level of granularity of the definition of the objects defines the level of details that will be processed by our PROLOG based inference system, simplified versions of algorithms from the inference system and how it works on the spatial dimension of the document are shown. In the end samples of how spatial relations manipulation algorithms work are illustrated.