Extending SMIL with 3D audio

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.This paper describes how SMIL can be extended to support 3D audio in a similar fashion than AABIFS does it for MPEG-4. The SMIL 2D layout is extended with an extra dimension to support a 3D space. New audio elements are positioned in the 3D space, whilst a listener element defines a listening point. Similarly to AABIFS perceptual modeling approach, an environment element describes environmental parameters for audio elements. These extensions enable interactive 3D audio capabilities in SMIL. In addition, any XML based rendering language could be extended with 3D audio capabilities by using a similar approach

Secure Web Forms with Client-Side Signatures

Abstract. The World Wide Web is evolving from a platform for infor-mation access into a platform for interactive services. The interaction of the services is provided by forms. Some of these services, such as bank-ing and e-commerce, require secure, non-repudiable transactions. This paper presents a novel scheme for extending the current Web forms lan-guage, XForms, with secure client-side digital signatures, using the XML Signatures language. The requirements for the scheme are derived from representative use cases. A key requirement, also for legal validity of the signature, is the reconstruction of the signed form, when validat-ing the signature. All the resources, referenced by the form, including client-side default stylesheets, have to be included within the signature. Finally, this paper presents, as a proof of concept, an implementation of the scheme and a related use case. Both are included in an open-source XML browser, X-Smiles.

Extensions to the SMIL multimedia language

The goal of this work has been to extend the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) to study the capabilities and possibilities of declarative multimedia languages for the World Wide Web (Web). The work has involved design and implementation of several extensions to SMIL. A novel approach to include 3D audio in SMIL was designed and implemented. This involved extending the SMIL 2D spatial model with an extra dimension to support a 3D space. New audio elements and a listening point were positioned in the 3D space. The extension was designed to be modular so that it was possible to use it in conjunction with other XML languages, such as XHTML and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) language. Web forms are one of the key features in the Web, as they offer a way to send user data to a server. A similar feature is therefore desirable in SMIL, which currently lacks forms. The XForms language, due to its modular approach, was used to add this feature to SMIL. An evaluation of this integration was carried out as part of this work. Furthermore, the SMIL player was designed to play out dynamic SMIL documents, which can be modified at run-time and the result is immediately reflected in the presentation. Dynamic SMIL enables execution of scripts to modify the presentation. XML Events and ECMAScript were chosen to provide the scripting functionality. In addition, generic methods to extend SMIL were studied based on the previous extensions. These methods include ways to attach new input and output capabilities to SMIL. To experiment with the extensions, a Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) player was developed. The current final version can play out SMIL 2.0 Basic profile documents with a few additional SMIL modules, such as event timing, basic animations, and brush media modules. The player includes all above-mentioned extensions. The SMIL player has been designed to work within an XML browser called X-Smiles. X-Smiles is intended for various embedded devices, such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), and digital television set-top boxes. Currently, the browser supports XHTML, SMIL, and XForms, which are developed by the current research group. The browser also supports other XML languages developed by 3rd party open-source projects. The SMIL player can also be run as a standalone player without the browser. The standalone player is portable and has been run on a desktop PC, PDA, and digital television set-top box. The core of the SMIL player is platform-independent, only media renderers require platform-dependent implementation.reviewe

Integración de sistemas heredados utilizando web services

Hoy en día, la mayoría de las organizaciones se encuentran adaptando sus procesos de negocios a los nuevos escenarios económicos y tecnológicos, a efectos de poderse mantener competitivas en estos. En ese sentido, la modernización e integración de sus Sistemas de Software son tareas indispensables para lograr ese objetivo. En algunas organizaciones, el portafolio de Sistemas de Software esta compuesto por los llamados Sistemas Heredados, los cuales en la mayoría de casos, por dar soporte a funciones de misión crítica de la organización, es necesario modernizar e integrar. La modernizacin e integracin de Sistemas Heredados no es una tarea fcil sino imposible de lograr, dada las caractersticas de estos sistemas, como por ejemplo tener una estructura monoltica, estar desarrollados con tecnologa obsoleta, poseer poca o nula documentacin, etc. Tradicionalmente, los esfuerzos de integracin de estos sistemas apuntan al reemplazo total (rediseo) o gradual (migracin) de estos sistemas. En muchos casos, estos esfuerzos han fracasado dado que los nuevos sistemas no tenan las mismas funcionalidades de los Sistemas Heredados, debido principalmente a que la documentacin era muy pobre. Una estrategia mas simple, es la de dotar de un nuevo visual al sistema, o sea desarrollar una especie de envoltorio grafico (wrapping) que permita acceder a sus funcionalidades. Esta estrategia es muy ampliamente utilizada. Con el advenimiento del concepto de Reuso de Software y dado que los Sistemas Heredados poseen funcionalidades que han demostrado su confiabilidad a lo largo de los aos, seria interesante exponer estas para que puedan ser utilizadas en la construccin de otros sistemas. En ese sentido, la aparicin de nuevas tecnologas computacionales, como por ejemplo Web Services, permite que estas funcionales puedan ser reutilizadas en el desarrollo de nuevos sistemas, con lo cual se consigue revitalizar a los Sistemas Heredados. Es objetivo de esta tesis, es mostrar la utilización de la tecnología de Web Services como una nueva estrategia de integración de Sistemas Heredados.Tesi

Web application user interface technologies

The World Wide Web has expanded from a huge information storage repository into a worldwide application platform. Web applications have several benefits compared to desktop applications. An application can be used anywhere from any system and device, which means that only one version is needed, they do not need to be installed and developers can modify running applications. Despite all the benefits of the Web, web applications are suffering because they are developed using the same technologies as the static documents on the Web. Some of these web technologies are outdated and were not originally designed for the complex use cases of the modern applications to which they are now applied. For instance, HTML forms comprise the main interaction of an application, despite not having been designed to describe complex and interactive UIs. Another example is HTTP communication on the Web, which always requires client initiative and is too restrictive for dynamic web applications. Additionally, new usage contexts have brought with them new requirements for web applications, which are no longer used only via Graphical User Interfaces. Recently, several parties have developed specialized technologies for web application development. These solutions are not only minor additions to the existing technologies, but also new technologies. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the advanced web technologies and propose improvements to the technologies and architecture where applicable. The technologies are evaluated against a large set of requirements. The aim of the evaluation is two-fold. The first part is to select a technology on which to base the further improvements, and the second is to identify the deficiencies of the current solutions. The improvements focus on the developers' point-of-view. Based on the evaluation, this thesis proposes certain improvements related to multimodal interaction, server push, and remote UI updates. It also discusses software that supports the improvements and XML-based web technologies. Finally, the improvements are evaluated against the requirements and compared to other solutions

Scalable User Interfaces for the Web / by Arman Danesh.

This thesis describes a new approach to developing and delivering user interfaces for Web applications. This approach, termed Scalable User Interfaces (SUI), is designed to allow a developer to create a single user interface definition for a Web application which can then be consumed, rendered and used by any device on the network. These devices can range from small displays such as mobile telephones to the full desktop-sized monitor displays used by personal computers. The goal of Scalable User Interfaces is to allow a single specification to be deployed on all devices without the need for the developer to specify any device-specific vocabularies, transformations, hinting or style sheets such as previous work in automated rendering for mixed displays and work in platform-independent user interface specification. Scalable User Interfaces provides a Flash-based implementation which highlights the utility of Flash as a tool for user interface design and research. Our work also illustrates the application of recursive rendering in laying out forms for various-sized displays