ON AUTOMATIC-GENERATION OF MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATIONS

We propose a mechanism and system for the automatic generation of inte ractive multimedia presentations from their specifications. A presenta tion specification contains three parts: the resources, the temporal i nformation, and the spatial information. We use an ICON programming te chnique, and a graphical user interface allows the presentation design er to quickly specify what he/she wants. Our system takes these requir ements and relies on inference rules written in Prolog to generate int eractive presentations. These inference rules are based on interval te mporal logic and important issues in multimedia presentations,1 such a s the hardware limitations of an ordinary personal computer and the pr operties of a multimedia resource. Our prototype system runs under MS Windows. The early experience of using the system shows that it is fea sible to use logic inference rules to assist the design of good multim edia presentations. (C) Elsevier Science Inc. 1997