Improving media fragment integration in emerging web formats

The media components integrated into multimedia presentations are typically entire files. At times the media component desired for integration, either as a navigation destination or as coordinate presentation, is a part of a file, or what we call a fragment. Basic media fragment integration has long been implemented in hypermedia systems, but not to the degree envisioned by hypermedia research. The current emergence of several XML-based formats is beginning to extend the possibilities for media fragment integration on a large scale. This paper presents a set of requirements for media fragment integration, describes how standards currently meet some of these requirements and proposes extensions to these standards for meeting remaining requirements

Sequence and Emphasis in Automated Domain-Independent Discourse Generation

For humans to gain comprehensive views of large amounts of repository contents, they need to have insight into the relations among information objects. It is a challenge to automatically generate presentations of repository contents, through, for example, search results, which reveal such relations to readers. Such presentations must reflect properties of information objects such that large sets of information objects appear as a coherent whole. An approach to this is generation of discourse structures that convey such properties of information objects in presentations. Semantic Web technology provides a conceptual basis for generation of discourse in Web-based information environments. This paper describes automatic generation of sequence and emphasis in presentations of information objects. It shows generation of object sequences and emphasis in accordance with a user input of relevance of information attributes in our Topia architecture. The resulting presentations allow users to encounter informati

Sequence and emphasis in automated domain-independent discourse generation

For humans to gain comprehensive views of large amounts of repository contents, they need to have insight into the relations among information objects. It is a challenge to automatically generate presentations of repository contents, through, for example, search results, which reveal such relations to readers. Such presentations must reflect properties of information objects such that large sets of information objects appear as a coherent whole. An approach to this is generation of discourse structures that convey such properties of information objects in presentations. Semantic Web technology provides a conceptual basis for generation of discourse in Web-based information environments. This paper describes automatic generation of sequence and emphasis in presentations of information objects. It shows generation of object sequences and emphasi

Hypermedia and the semantic web: a research agenda

Until recently, the Semantic Web was little more than a name for the next generation Web infrastructure as envisioned by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Now, with the introduction of XML and RDF, and new developments such as RDF Schema and DAML+OIL, the Semantic Web is rapidly taking shape. In this paper, we first give an overview of the state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology, the key relationships with traditional hypermedia research, and a comprehensive reference list to various sets of literature (Hypertext, Web and Semantic Web). The core of the paper presents a research agenda b

Clustering semantics for hypermedia presentation

Semantic annotations of media repositories make relationships among the stored media and relevant concepts explicit. However, these relationships and the media they join are not directly presentable as hypermedia. Previous work shows how clustering over the annotations in the repositories can determine hypermedia presentation structure. Here we explore the application of different clustering techniques to generating hypermedia interfaces to media archives. This paper also describes the effect of each type of clustering on the end user's experience. We then generalize and unify these techniques with the use of proximity measures in further improving generated presentation structur

The Use of SMIL: Multimedia Research Currently Applied on a Global Scale

This paper describes the current use of the multimedia standard SMIL. SMIL features that relate to active areas of multimedia research are discussed. SMIL current implementation in existing browsers is described. Examples from the Web of SMIL applications representing different types of multimedia are presented. These discussions together provide an overview of how SMIL currently addresses the needs of multimedia distributed on the Web

Integrating multimedia characteristics in web-based document languages

A single multimedia document model needs to include a wide range of different types of information. In particular, information about space and time is essential for determining the spatial and temporal placement of elements within a presentation. Each information type included in a document model requires its own structuring mechanisms. The language used to express the document model has to be able to encapsulate the plurality of required structures. While this is a process that can be carried out relatively easily during the initial design of a language, it is more difficult in the case t

Accuracy in Rating and Recommending Item Features

This paper discusses accuracy in processing ratings of and recommendations for item features. Such processing facilitates featurebased user navigation in recommender system interfaces. Item features, often in the form of tags, categories or meta-data, are becoming important hypertext components of recommender interfaces. Recommending features would help unfamiliar users navigate in such environments. This work explores techniques for improving feature recommendation accuracy. Conversely, it also examines possibilities for processing user ratings of features to improve recommendation of both features and items. This work’s illustrative implementation is a web portal for a museum collection that lets users browse, rate and receive recommendations for both artworks and interrelated topics about them. Accuracy measurements compare proposed techniques for processing feature ratings and recommending features. Resulting techniques recommend features with relative accuracy. Analysis indicates that processing ratings of either features or items does not improve accuracy of recommending the other

Towards a multimedia formatting vocabulary

Time-based, media-centric Web presentations can be described declaratively in the XML world through the development of languages such as SMIL. It is difficult, however, to fully integrate them in a complete document transformation processing chain. In order to achieve the desired processing of data-driven, time-based, media-centric presentations, the text-flow based formatting vocabularies used by style languages such as XSL, CSS and DSSSL need to be extended. The paper presents a selection of use cases which are used to derive a list of requirements for a multimedia style and transformation formatting vocabulary. The boundaries of applicability of existing text-based formatting models for media-centric transformations are analyzed. The paper then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a fully-fledged time-based multimedia formatting model. Finally, the discussion is illustrated by describing the key properties of the example multimedia formatting vocabulary currently implemented in the back-end of our Cuypers multimedia transformation engine