I work in the fields of multimedia and hypermedia. I am involved in four projects.
Media Construction Formalism.
This is joint work with Marc
Nanard and Jocelyne Nanard at
LIRMM Montpellier. We thare investigating how several of the
general-purpose design principles from the area of large-scale
software development and maintenance can be applied to the design
of multimedia artefacts. We have developed the Media Construction
Formalism, MCF system, an interactive tool for multimedia design.
MCF uses the metaphor of roles,
players and actors to provide generic design descriptions of
multimedia scenarios, and encompasses a powerful temporal and
reactive model.
Formal methods for multimedia description
This work is joint with
Simon Thompson (Kent, UK), and in part with
Helen Cameron
(Manitoba) and
Howard Bowman (Kent). We have two projects under this heading.
First, we make use of an interval temporal logic, Mexitl,
in multimedia modelling and authoring. Second, we use the functional language
Haskell
together with
FRAN
, an embedded language for interactive
animations, for multimedia document specification.
The Haskell/Fran approach is a particularly useful tool to represent
reactive relationships between components.
We have performed a comparative study of the Haskell/Fran
approach just described, the MCF approach described earlier,
and the language
SMIL
promulgated by the
World Wide Web Consortium
Functional and declarative extensions to SMIL
This is more recent work, and is joint with
Patrick Schmitz
and
Simon Thompson.
SMIL lacks a number of useful features to be found in a
functional approach to multimedia modelling such as our Haskell/Fran work.
At the same time, SMIL is easier to implement than Haskell/Fran, and
adheres to the World Wide Web Consortium's requirement that SMIL be an
XML application. Our work is to consider how much of the functional
and declarative component of Haskell/Fran could be suitably included
in an extended version of SMIL.
Digital Libraries and OPALES
In cooperation with a group working within
ARC at
LIRMM Montpellier, especially
Marc
Nanard and Jocelyne Nanard,
we designed and developed an open digital library framework.
Our approach
supports collaborative activity for building and sharing metadata
structures and knowledge within archives. The OPALES framework has
been used to develop a video archive digital library, which permits
users to build and to share new services for accessing archives
according to the needs of user interest groups.
ITS: What and Whither? and who and how? Invited Paper YRT, ITS'2002: Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems 05-08 June 2002 Biarritz, France.
Digital Documents: Systems and Principles,
8th International Conference on Digital Documents and Electronic Publishing, DDEP 2000,
and 5th International Workshop on the Principles of Digital Document Processing, PODDP 2000.
(with Ethan V. Munson)
LNCS 2023, Springer Verlag, 2004
Declarative extensions of XML languages
Simon Thompson and Peter King
Technical Report 3-07, University of Kent, May 2007,
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2007/2524/
earlier version of subsequent article
Proceedings of SADPI '07 International Workshop
On Semantically Aware Document Processing And Indexing.
May 21-22, 2007 Montpellier, France.
Jointly edited with M Nanard, J Nanard, M-L Mugnier, J-Y Delort
DocEng '07 The ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2007, was held at the University of Manitoba.
The dates for this Symposium were August 28 - 31, 2007.
Details of this meeting can be found
by following this link
Personal and Professional Stuff
I am Chair of
CSAC ,
the Computer Science Accreditation Council of
CIPS
I am a member of
CCC ,
the CIPS Certification Council.
I play violin with a group of friends; we have
been christened The Crusty Academics
Here are the Palavas les Flots
pictures and information -- but you need the password!