An Export Architecture for a Multimedia Authoring Environment

In this paper, we propose an export architecture that provides a clear separation of authoring services from publication services. We illustrate this architecture with the LimSee3 authoring tool and several standard publication formats: Timesheets, SMIL, and XHTML

Multimedia applications for playing with digitized theater performances

International audienceThis article presents a multimedia production chain that specializes in semantically annotated digitized theater performances. Semantic annotations--we prefer the term descriptions--are expressed in a description language that combines object-oriented features, taxonomical inheritance and temporal aggregations. The descriptions that are produced from several types of content related to the same theater play are synchronized at several levels of granularity providing rich relationships between the narrative structure of the text of the play and the narrative structure of the digitized theater performances. Two applications for multimedia access and navigation are presented in this paper, namely Dual Players, a navigation application that allows to synchronously play acts and scenes of two recordings; and Synthesizer that produces a raw publication of a new audiovisual document on the basis of the recordings

Formatting structured documents

Although it is well established that structured documents and generic models bring benefits to applications involving documents, integrating these document models in the formatting process of interactive editors is still an open problem. In this paper, the problem of laying out and formatting structured documents is investigated, taking into account the DSSSL standard. One key point of this model is the possibility to express the logical structure of documents independently from their graphical aspect. However this approach induces a more complex formatting process, as two independent structures have to be merged. This discussion is illustrated by our experience of dynamic formatting in the Grif editor

Visualization of Constrainted-based Temporal Scenarios in a Multimedia Authoring Tool

Authoring a multimedia document is known to be a non-trivial task. The use of constraints technology is a good way to ease this task if constraints specification are associated to a powerful visual interface. We discuss in this paper the main requirements for the design of such an interface and we present our proposition experimented in Madeus a constraint-based authoring environment

Multimedia Authoring for CoPs

9 pagesInternational audienceOne way of providing technological support for CoPs is to help participants to produce, structure and share information. As this information becomes more and more multimedia in nature, the challenge is to build multimedia authoring and publishing tools that meets CoPs requirements. In this paper we analyze these requirements and propose a multimedia authoring model and a generic platform on which specific CoPs-oriented authoring tools can be realized. The main idea is to provide template-based authoring tools while keeping rich composition capabilities and smooth adaptability. It is based on a component-oriented approach integrating homogeneously logical, time and spatial structures. Templates are defined as constraints on these structures

Timesheets.js: When SMIL Meets HTML5 and CSS3

International audienceIn this paper, we explore different ways to publish multimedia documents on the web. We propose a solution that takes advantage of the new multimedia features of web standards, namely HTML5 and CSS3. To avoid the usual development of complex scripts for handling timing, synchronization and user interaction, we propose to complement HTML5 and CSS3 with SMIL Timesheets. This is made possible by a Timesheets scheduler that runs in the browser. Various applications based on this solution illustrate the paper, ranging from media annotations to web documentaries

Improving Formatting Documents by Coupling Formatting Systems

International audienceIn this paper, we present a framework for coupling an existing formatting system such as SMIL or Madeus with a formatting control system called XEF. This framework allows the coupling process to be performed at two levels: 1) the language level, which is concerned with how to link the control features of XEF and the elements of an existing formatting system, and 2) the formatter level, which deals with the creation of a new formatter by formatter composition. The overall objective is to provide more powerful and flexible formatting services to cover new needs such as adaptive and/or generated presentations

Spatio-temporal Validation of Multimedia Documents

International audienceA multimedia document authoring system should provide analysis and validation tools that help authors find and correct mistakes before document deployment. Although very useful, multimedia validation tools are not often provided. Spatial validation of multimedia documents may be performed over the initial position of media items before presentation starts. However, such an approach does not lead to ideal results when media item placement changes over time. Some document authoring languages allow the definition of spatio-temporal relationships among media items and they can be moved or resized during runtime. Current validation approaches do not verify dynamic spatio-temporal relationships. This paper presents a novel approach for spatio-temporal validation of multimedia documents. We model the document state, extending the Simple Hyperme-dia Model (SHM), comprising media item positioning during the whole document presentation. Mapping between document states represent time lapse or user interaction. We also define a set of atomic formulas upon which the author's expectations related to the spatio-temporal layout can be described and analyzed

Authoring XML all the Time, Everywhere and by Everyone

International audienceThis article presents a framework for editing, publishing and sharing XML content directly from within the browser. It comes in two parts: XTiger XML and AXEL. XTiger XML is a document template specification language for creating document models. AXEL is a client-side Javascript library that turns the document template into a document editing application running in the browser. This framework is targeted at non XML speaking end users, since it preserves end users from XML syntax during editing. Its current implementation proposes a pseudo-WYSIWYG user interface where the document template provides a document-oriented editing metaphor, or a more form-oriented metaphor, depending on the template

Optimising SPARQL Query Evaluation in the Presence of ShEx Constraints

International audienceShEx (Shape Expressions) is a language for expressing constraints on RDF graphs. In this work, we optimise the evaluation of conjunctive SPARQL queries, on RDF graphs, by taking advantage of ShEx constraints. Our optimisation is based on computing and assigning ranks to query triple patterns, dictating their order of execution. We first define a set of well-formed ShEx schemas, that possess interesting characteristics for SPARQL query optimisation. We then define our optimisation method by exploiting information extracted from a ShEx schema. We finally report on evaluation results performed showing the advantages of applying our optimisation on the top of an existing state-of-the-art query evaluation system