Interactive authoring of multimedia documents in a constraint-based authoring system

As multimedia applications spread widely, it is crucial for programming and design support systems to handle “time” in multimedia documents effectively and flexibly. This paper presents a set of interactive system support tools for designing and maintaining the temporal behavior of multimedia documents. The tool set provides mechanisms for anomaly detection, temporal query processing, and interactive scheduling. It is based on a fast incremental constraint solver we have developed, which can be adapted by any constraint-based system. The incremental constraint solver provides immediate feedback to the user, supporting a highly interactive design process. Combined with existing optimal layout generation mechanisms proposed in the literature, our tools effectively utilize the flexibility provided by constraint-based systems.