Laurent Tardif

Madeus, and authoring environment for interactive multimedia documents

We present Madeus, an authoring environment for interactive multimedia documents. Madeus ‘aim can be sumed up in the following statement : high temporal expressivity must not be reached to the detriment of a user-friendly inter

A Scalable Toolkit for Designing Multimedia Authoring Environments

ace editing approach. We provide the author with a declarative and hierarchic specification language based on an extension of Allen ’s algebra. Static temporal checking and dynamic scheduling are based on an extension of temporal constraint networks. Multimedia documents compose in time and space different types of elements like video, audio, still-picture, text, synthesized image, etc. Interactive multimedia documents aim at transforming the reader from passive (he cannot interact with the document presentation) to an active one. Our goals is to design an authoring environment for interactive multimedia documents [4,5]. We set the following ambitious target for our projects:

Constraint Techniques for Authoring Multimedia Documents

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.

Authoring SMIL documents by direct manipulations during presentation

Authoring a multimedia document requires to specify both its spatial layout and its temporal organization, i.e. when and where objects such as pictures, texts and videos appear/disappear on /from the screen and when objects such as audios and videos start/end to play. In this paper, we present some benefits authors can gain when using an authoring tool in which constraints are used to specify these two kinds of information. We describe our experience in building Madeus, a constraint-based environment to design multimedia documents and we point out technical problems that still need to be solved to more completely satisfy author requirements.

Multiviews interfaces for multimedia authoring environments

This paper presents Smil‐Editor – an authoring environment to write multimedia documents encoded in SMIL. The main feature of Smil‐Editor is to strongly integrate the presentation view, in which the document is executed, with the editing process. In this view objects can be selected to perform a wide set of editing actions ranging from attributes setting to direct spatial or temporal editions. This way of editing a multimedia document is close to the well‐known WYSIWYG paradigm used by usual word‐processors. Moreover, in order to help the author to specify the temporal organisation of documents, Smil‐Editor provides an execution report displayed through a timeline view. This view also contains information which helps the author to understand why such execution occurred. These multiple and synchronised views aim at covering the various needs for authoring multimedia documents.