Template-based, format-extensible authoring for BS digital data broadcast service

This paper gives an outline of a template-based authoring system for BS (Br oadcast Satellite) digital data broadcast service started in December 2000 in Japan. The system is designed to compose multimedia documents in BML (Br oadcast Markup Language) for mat. BML is an XML (eXtensible Markup Language ) based data specification language adopted as Japanese standard for the se rvice. The authoring system provides template functions to combine XML data sources with BML style templates. Also it provides data-binding rules with the templates to generate BML instances automatically. The templates and t he rules are extensible so that they can generate multi-format contents wri tten in BML and HTML for crossmedia services.