AN ARCHITECTURE AND A DATA MODEL FOR INTEGRATED MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTS AND PRESENTATIONAL APPLICATIONS

The new generation of multimedia documents requires novel editing capa bilities and complex multimedia authoring and presentation systems. In view of the existing variety of multimedia authoring systems, the cha llenge arises in providing an integrated and homogeneous way to access , process, and exchange multimedia documents. In this context, a docum ent model that facilitates the interchange of multimedia documents pro duced by different authoring and presentation systems is required. Thi s model defines a structure intended for the representation of documen ts in terms of the organization of the information they contain and th e synchronization involved in the rendering of that information. In th is paper, a model for structuring multimedia documents is proposed. Th e model defines a computing architecture and a document architecture. The computing architecture captures the structure of the script of the document, while the document architecture captures the structure of t he information contained in the document. The main contribution of the model is that it establishes the relationship between the information structure and the presentation structure of a multimedia document.