Media construction patterns: Abstraction and reuse in multimedia application specifications
Jocelyne Nanard, Marc Nanard, Peter King
Multimedia Computing and Networking 2001 (MMCN'01) January, 2001 San Jose, California
ABSTRACT
Constructs to assist in the design of multimedia documents are different in nature from constructs for document descriptions to be processed by multimedia systems. In this article we introduce the media construction pattern (MCP), a new formalism supporting abstraction and re-use at the artifact design level. MCP relies on a temporal model similar to that of SMIL Boston, but targets design issues. The main characteristics of MCP are: (i) its ability to support an arbitrary level of abstraction, (ii) its ability to describe generic behavior, using the notions of roles, players and actors, (iii) its use of evolution laws to provide an integrated specification of spatial, temporal, and individual behavior, (iv) the specification of computable compositions which may depend on run time events, (v) an author-friendly graphical representation. We present a set of criteria for the expressive power of constructs supporting multimedia design, and we discuss how MCP satisfies these criteria.
Keywords
Multimedia, design, abstraction, reuse, role, media construction patterns, scenario, SMIL.
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