Processing Structured Hypermedia : A Matter of Style

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations

Authentic tasks for revision [poster]

In this case study, the use of an authentic task for revision of a Masters-level Information Technology course, Multimedia Systems, is described and evaluated. Authentic tasks are designed to mirror problems as they are encountered in the real world, with often ill-defined or even conflicting requirements, and limited time and resources available to develop a solution. While authentic tasks are increasingly used in higher education for the purposes of assessment, the small-scale study (n = 8) described here highlights the applicability of such an approach to revision. During a two-hour revision session, an authentic scenario was presented to students wherein they were to assume the role of a software development company bidding for work on the development of a multimedia application. The presented scenario was deliberately vague from a technical perspective. Students were divided into two smaller groups to introduce a competitive element and to better facilitate group discussion. Students were asked to devise and present a pitch that would see their fictional company win the contract, drawing on material taught over the semester. Following the presentations and ensuing discussion, students were asked to complete a short questionnaire to determine their opinion of the exercise’s effectiveness. The students’ responses were uniformly positive, and suggested that such authentic revision tasks may provide an excellent opportunity for students to learn from their peers, to and gain valuable experience in an environment that mimics that with which they will soon be faced following graduation

Self-modifiable color petri nets for modeling user manipulation and network event handling

A Self-Modifiable Color Petri Net (SMCPN) which has multimedia synchronization capability and the ability to model user manipulation and network event (i.e. network congestion, etc.) handling is proposed in this paper. In SMCPN, there are two types of tokens: resource tokens representing resources to be presented and color tokens with two sub-types: one associated with some commands to modify the net mechanism in operation, another associated with a number to decide iteration times. Also introduced is a new type of resource token named reverse token that moves to the opposite direction of arcs. When user manipulation/network event occurs, color tokens associated with the corresponding interrupt handling commands will be injected into places that contain resource tokens. These commands are then executed to handle the user manipulation/network event. SMCPN has the desired general programmability in the following sense: 1) It allows handling of user manipulations or pre-specified events at any time while keeping the Petri net design simple and easy. 2) It allows the user to customize event handling beforehand. This means the system being modeled can handle not only commonly seen user interrupts (e.g. skip, reverse, freeze), the user is free to define new operations including network event handling. 3) It has the power to simulate self-modifying protocols. A simulator has been built to demonstrate the feasibility of SMCPN

The Anatomy of an adaptive multimedia presentation system

The use of multimedia presentations within learning environments is described and guidelines for the design of good E-Learning systems are identified. It is argued that a linear sequential presentation of knowledge segments is effective, but that the user is provided with optional links to relevant segments during the presentation. The synchronisation of multiple media is considered and the design of a prototype E-Learning system is discussed. The segmentation of material is then discussed and how the information can be stored in a data repository consider with respect to the requirement of accessing linked segments. Finally, the nature of adaptivity is discussed leading to a discussion of the salient parts of an adaptive multimedia presentation system

E-LEARNING OR CLASSIC EDUCATION?

The digital environment extents obvious the sphere, being used to provide information and to express ideas in different manners: verbal, visual, auditory or a mix by all these. As result, for educators will be more and more difficult to favour the handle of verbal language to detriment of others expression modalities. Internet becomes, in every day, the referee of education and culture access, and the most adequate form from to come in the meet of knowledge needs and continuous formation is E-Learning.educational add value, higher education services, academics sites, e-learning, marketing research, consumer

Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web

This document gives an overview on the state-of-the-art of multimedia metadata formats. Initially, practical relevant vocabularies for developers of Semantic Web applications are listed according to their modality scope. In the second part of this document, the focus is set on the integration of the multimedia vocabularies into the Semantic Web, that is to say, formal representations of the vocabularies are discussed

Creating harmonious and legible colour schemes in the automated generation of multimedia presentations

Due to the growing amount of information on the web, the user specific requirements and different characteristics of output devices, the opportunities for the automatic generation of multimedia presentations grow. The multimedia presentation generator, that resides in a dynamic environment, such as a museum website, where the user requirements, presentation device characteristics, presentation content and the domain characteristics are not known in advance, needs to be able to compose a presentation. With respect to stylistic design, graphic designers can create a template providing stylistic aspects, but as soon as any of the dynamic attributes of the system change this can result in the need for redesign. We argue that with the correct balance between form and function and by using relevant aspects of design theory, the automatic presentation generator can keep harmony and legibility factors in balance. The aim of this work is to demonstrate this approach on the example of automatic colour design with the use of colour theory from Itten and Tufte. By taking required legibility factors into account, harmonious and well balanced colour schemes, adapted to the requirements of the user, the characteristics of the presentation platform, the content's domain and discourse model can be created. We apply our approach to the domain of presentation environments for musea for fine arts