Generating Multilingual Personalized Descriptions of Museum Exhibits - The M-PIRO Project

This paper provides an overall presentation of the M-PIRO project. M-PIRO is developing technology that will allow museums to generate automatically textual or spoken descriptions of exhibits for collections available over the Web or in virtual reality environments. The descriptions are generated in several languages from information in a language-independent database and small fragments of text, and they can be tailored according to the backgrounds of the users, their ages, and their previous interaction with the system. An authoring tool allows museum curators to update the system's database and to control the language and content of the resulting descriptions. Although the project is still in progress, a Web-based demonstrator that supports English, Greek and Italian is already available, and it is used throughout the paper to highlight the capabilities of the emerging technology.Comment: 15 pages. Presented at the 29th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Gotland, Sweden, 2001. A version of the paper with higher quality images can be downloaded from: http://www.iit.demokritos.gr/~ionandr/caa_paper.pd

Authoring Multimedia Documents Using WYSIWYM Editing

This paI)cr out;lincs a filturc 'idcal' mulimedia docnmcnt authoring system that allows authors to specity content; and form of t;he documenl; independently of each other and at a high level of abstraction; (2) It describes a working system that iml)le- ments a sinall but significant part of the fimctionality of such an ideal system, based on semantic modeling of the pictures as well as the text of the document; and (3) It explains what needs to be done to bridge the gap between the implemented system and the ideal one

Manual and automatic authoring for adaptive hypermedia

Adaptive Hypermedia allows online content to be tailored specifically to the needs of the user. This is particularly valuable in educational systems, where a student might benefit from a learning experience which only displays (or recommends) content that they need to know. Authoring for adaptive systems requires content to be divided into stand-alone fragments which must then be labelled with sufficient pedagogical metadata. Authors must also create a pedagogical strategy that selects the appropriate content depending on (amongst other things) the learner's profile. This authoring process is time-consuming and unfamiliar to most non-technical authors. Therefore, to ensure that students (of all ages, ability level and interests) can benefit from Adaptive Educational Hypermedia, authoring tools need to be usable by a range of educators. The overall aim of this thesis is therefore to identify the ways that this authoring process can be simplified. The research in this thesis describes the changes that were made to the My Online Teacher (MOT) tool in order to address issues such as functionality and usability. The thesis also describes usability and functionality changes that were made to the GRAPPLE Authoring Tool (GAT), which was developed as part of a European FP7 project. These two tools (which utilise different authoring paradigms) were then used within a usability evaluation, allowing the research to draw a comparison between the two toolsets. The thesis also describes how educators can reuse their existing non-adaptive (linear) material (such as presentations and Wiki articles) by importing content into an adaptive authoring system