Efficient approaches for multimedia authoring and presentation

Abstract

Authoring presentations for distributed multimedia applications is a complex design task The authoring tools need to be equipped with extended capabilities to support the creation of these presentations While several existing works have presented prototypes of authoring tools having augmented capabilities most of these focus on dynamically presenting different views to the user while creating the presentation These include structural views, hierarchical views as well as graphical views that together form the user interface of the authoring tool The work presented in this thesis also focuses on enhancing the capabilities of authoring tools by using a very innovative and efficient approach for dynamic consistency checking While authoring a presentation the primary goal of the author would be to accurately specify the relationships in terms of time and space between the media objects involved in the presentation These temporal and spatial relations are captured using special operators associated with the existing authoring tools A new spatio temporal operator that is functionally complete has been proposed here and it captures the presentation specifications effectively This new operator has been designed specifically to overcome the limitations of the existing operators in supporting dynamic consistency checking