Muriel Jourdan

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

Formal Verification in Robotics: Why and How?

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:

A Scalable Toolkit for Designing Multimedia Authoring Environments

A mobile robot aimed to operate in an hazardous environment is a typical example of critical system. We mean here that, for such a system, like for a satellite, any repairing or recovery operation, even a mission reconfiguration, which would involve the intervention of a human operator is always costly, often difficult and sometimes impossible. This is why such systems should be at least provided with capacities of on-line adaption, like self replanning or sensor-based control. However, this is not sufficient and we have to be sure, as far as possible, that the system will behave correctly, before launching. More precisely, once a mission has been defined, we would like to verify that: its specifications are correct, i.e. that they correspond to the desired goals, its programming conforms to specifications, the constraints induced by real-time and implementation issues do not disturb its behavior.

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.

Specification, Formal Verification and Implementation of Tasks and Missions for an Autonomous Vehicle

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.

Time representation and management in MADEUS: an authoring environment for multimedia documents

This paper describes the use of modern approaches of formal verification of behavioral and temporal properties in an experimentation of automatic vehicle following. We firstly recall the key concepts of the proposed specification method: the robot-task, which allows to describe in a structured way an automatic control law and the associated discrete-event handling; the robot-procedure, which is the specification of complex missions from the logical point of view. We then present the used environment (Orccad) and verification tools, based on the use of synchronous languages for the reactive part of the system. This is followed by a description of the conducted experiments, which involves two electric cars, within the Praxitele project. Results and foreseen future works are given in the conclusion.

A formal semantics of SMIL: a web standard to describe multimedia documents

In this paper, we present the currently achieved results of our research goal: building an easy to use and powerful multimedia documents authoring environment, which provides high level of expressiveness and open document format. These results are concerned with both the time representation and the time management in our authoring system Madeus. In the first part of the paper, we describe the requirements that must be provided by a time representation of multimedia documents, the choice we made and a comparison with other existing approaches. In the second part, we describe the presentation layer of our system, and how it handles services such as dynamic formatting, temporal access control operations and hyperlinks.

Madeus: an authoring environment for interactive multimedia documents

Abstract This paper presents a formal semantics of a subset of SMIL2.0: a W3C recommendation to describe interactive multimedia documents on the Web. This work has been used during the design of this standard to improve its consistency. It is also intended to help SMIL developers to understand the specification. Doing so, it will contribute to increase SMIL chances of success in achieving the interoperability goal and, thus, its impact on the new information society.

Multiviews interfaces for multimedia authoring environments

We present Madeus, an authoring environment for interactive multimedia documents. Madeuss aim can be summed up in the following statement: high temporal expressivity must not be reached to the detriment of a user-friendly interface editing approach. We provide the author with a declarative and hierarchical specification language based on an extension of Allens (1983) algebra. Static temporal checking and dynamic scheduling are based on an extension of temporal constraint networks.