Modelling and Authoring Hypermedia Documents

Author:

Lynda Hardman

Email:

Lynda.Hardman-at-cwi.nl

Advisor:

Arnold Smeulders and Dick Bulterman

Award Date:

March 1998

Institution:

University of Amsterdam

Institution Location:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Web Location:

http://www.cwi.nl/~lynda/thesis/

Abstract:

Hypermedia presentations are documents which are not printed on paper but make use of a computer screen for their display. These include text, video, images and audio combined together as well as choice points where a reader can select other presentations to view. We use the term media items for the pieces of text, video etc. and call the choice points links. When combining media items into a presentation, temporal relations among the items specify when each item should appear on the screen and for how long.

A hypermedia presentation can be generated at play-back time from an underlying document which specifies the various aspects of the presentation. To allow presentations to be played on different software systems, a model of the underlying document is needed. Another advantage of having an explicit model is that documents can be processed for other reasons, such as creating multiple versions for different end-user platforms, or changing the visual styles of the document. It is this degree of compatibility and processability which we seek to achieve with a model of hypermedia documents.

Given a model for hypermedia documents, an authoring system can be created to support the creation, editing and deletion of the constituent parts of documents.

This thesis first states the requirements and defines a document model for hypermedia. It then analyses the user interfaces in existing authoring systems for multimedia documents and goes on to state the requirements for a complete hypermedia authoring environment. Finally, it describes the CMIFed authoring system, implemented by members of the CWI multimedia group.