Vitruv: Specifying Temporal Aspects of Multimedia Presentations - A Transformational Approach based on Intervals

The development of large multimedia applications reveals similar problems to those of developing large software systems. This is not surprising, as multimedia applications are a special kind of software systems. Our experience within the Altenberg Cathedral Project showed, however, that during developing multimedia applications particular problems arise, which do not appear during traditional software development. This is the starting point of the research reported in this thesis. In this introduction, we start with a report on the Altenberg Cathedral Project (sec. 1.1), resulting in a problem statement and a list of requirements for possible solutions. After that we propose our solution named Vitruv (sec. 1.2 on page 11) and explain how it works in general (sec. 1.3 on page 12). It is followed by a discussion of key aspects of Vitruv and relations to other approaches (sec. 1.4 on page 14). The introduction closes with a brief outline of the thesis

Experiences in 3-Dimensional Visualization of Java Class Relations

Java software provides a vast amount of information about class and interface relations. Inheritance- or uses-relations of large software systems lay great demands on being able to overview the scene. Class browsers may help to master the information, although visualization is usually limited to two dimensions. We analyze the benefits of 3D presentation and discuss experiences with our sualization tool J3Browser. The tool realizes these benefits and some selected visualization techniques within the Java context. This paper leads a step towards a CAD-like design of Java software in 3D space

Towards Constructing a Flexible Multimedia Environment for Teaching the History of Arts

Multimedia production displays two faces: a multimedia product is the result of programming as well as of publishing. Constructing a multimedia environment for teaching a course in the history of arts suggests that requirements elicitation has many facets and is central to success, hence has to be delt with in a particularly careful way, the more so since we wanted the art historians working in a specific and custom tailored environment. The problem was technically resolved by constructing a dedicated markup language based on XML. We discuss the process of requirements elicitation that led to the markup language and show how this is used as a cornerstone in the development of such an experimental environment