Presentation Services in MADEUS: an Authoring Environment for Multimedia Documents
Résumé
The recent advances in multimedia systems, together with the advent of high speed networks, paved the way to a new generation of applications. In particular, authoring environments have found in multimedia the means of increasing the richness of information contained in electronic documents. One of the goals of the Opera team is designing an authoring environment for multimedia documents, called MADEUS, which meets the following requirements: a high level of expressiveness for both spatial and temporal dimensions; a user-friendly interface allowing highly interactive design process, scriptless and structured-based editing and automatic production of spatial and temporal layout; the portability and cross-platform interchange of multimedia documents. To achieve this research goal we first focus on finding a good representation of time for multimedia documents. This representation is required to capture the temporal dimension of media objects like video, audio, etc. and is also used to temporally organize objects with respect to each other. Time representation is clearly the main difference between multimedia authoring environment and traditional editing environments. We present in this paper our first investigational results in our experimental authoring environment MADEUS. A large part of these results are based on the experience acquired in implementing the MADEUS prototype.