Electronic Multimedia Publishing

We describe MediaWeaver—a software framework for composing distributed media in the context of university research and instruction. Authors compose networked media, software tools and mediastreams, and can freely annotate media by media of any form using schema of their own design. Faculty and student authors compose distributed media using common Macintosh, World Wide Web and NeXTSTEP applications, supported by services from UNIX workstations.

The MediaWeaver system mediates between network multimedia services and interface kits with which novice programmers and non-programmers may easily create radically different interactive views into shared mediabases. The network services include search engine abstractions, filters, relational modeling frameworks.

MediaWeaver has supported collaborative projects in history, drama, music, art, anthropology, environmental studies, and other fields since 1993. Applications range from traditional relational text databases and indexed HTML WWW sites to course readers, research archives, journals and seminar spaces.

Creation of large and complex World Wide Web sites is hampered by the “page at a time” approach of many tools and the programming knowledge and custom software development required for automated solutions. This paper describes the development of Automatic Site Markup Language (ASML). ASML is a new markup language designed to automate and facilitate the production of large, complicated web sites which can include dynamic content or content that changes with time. ASML extends HTML with new, high-level features while still preserving complete compatibility with common browser and server technologies. It has powerful indexing and searching facilities, and enables the automatic translation of document formats. Most importantly, ASML provides HTML-like features at the site level rather than just the page level.

The advent of electronic documents and the consequent creation of digital libraries—vast repositories of electronic information—has a profound impact on how we produce, organize, store, retrieve and consume information. All of these activities have been dictated to the present by the technologies used to share information. A change in the underlying technology, namely, the move from paper to electronic documents, offers a unique opportunity to revolutionize how information is archived and disseminated. This paper will focus on a specific aspect of the opportunities opened up by electronic publishing on the NII—the ability to present information in multiple modalities and thereby free it from any single presentation medium.

Traditional printed communication relies on a passive intermediary, paper, for the exchange of information between the author and reader. Ideas put down on paper come back to life only when perused by the reader.

Electronic publishing is mediated by a computer, an agent capable of processing the information. As a consequence, the ideas expressed by an author need no longer be bound to any single “display” form; nor does it require human intervention to translate the information from one displayed form to another. Electronic information can be processed and displayed in a manner best suited to each individual’s needs. Thus, the advent of electronic documents makes information available in more than its visual form—electronic information can now be display-independent.

Traditionally, an electronic document has been viewed simply as digitally representing (or the means towards producing) the printed page. Instead, we view the electronic document as the basic entity that represents information; we allow the information to be rendered in different ways—on paper, spoken, processed in different ways by a computer, etc. This change of viewpoint has allowed us to develop A_ST_ER (Audio System For Technical Readings) a computing system that audio formats electronic documents to produce audio documents. A_ST_ER can speak both literary texts and highly technical documents that contain complex mathematics. Moreover, the listener can ask to have parts of a document repeated in different ways: a document has many different spoken views.

The adequacy of the audio rendering depends on how well the electronic document captures the essential internal structure of the information. In this paper, we discuss capturing structure and give guidelines for authors to follow to ensure that their documents exhibit structure adequately.

In the context of the NII, the digital libraries of the future can be viewed as large information servers that allow multiple clients to access and display information in a format chosen by the user. By obviating the need to move physical media, e.g., printed paper or recorded tapes, the NII enables the ready dissemination of multimodal renderings of information.

We present a methodology for automatically constructing structural hyperlinks in electronic technical corpora. A structural hyperlink connects components of a document that have specified structural properties with word-based content similarity. Our approach enables queries that may be posed in terms of keywords, as well as structural segments such as definitions, figures, etc.

This paper highlights the problems associated with placing technical multimedia materials on-line on the World Wide Web. It discusses obstacles in (a) automating the collection and processing of the multimedia components, and (b) limitations in the interface design imposed by restrictions associated with continuous media and especially audio. Using as paradigm the publishing of multimedia technical conference proceedings (“DAGS’95 Conference on Electronic Publishing and the Information Superhighway”), the paper proposes a manageable framework for the production of such proceedings, one that allows parallel development of the submitted papers in hypertext format and of the time-based media (talks) in multimedia format.

Multimedia authoring and publishing incorporates a variety of types of publications, from newly created multimedia presentations to digital libraries that incorporate a wide variety of pre-existing materials, from small self-published magazines to large productions that involve dozens or hundreds of workers and budgets nearing those of small feature films. In this paper, we consider an important form of electronic publication that is not frequently analyzed: the lecture, as reproduced and extended electronically.

We present a methodology for transforming a recorded lecture into an appropriately useful and interactive multimedia publication—the hyper-reproduction—highlighting techniques appropriate for publications with limited resources (workers, time, bandwidth, etc.). We suggest techniques for automating parts of the construction and discuss the added capabilities of such reproductions and their effect on how users access, navigate, and retain information.