A SMIL-based Multimedia Presentation Authoring System and Some Remarks on Future Extension of SMIL

We developed a multimedia presentation authoring system supporting a mechanism for conceptually representing the temporal relations of different media. Our authoring system represents media (such as images, videos, sounds, etc.) as objects and provides various editing functionalities for temporal compositions and spatial compositions. It is based on the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). The system contains a temporal relation editor, a timeline editor, a layout editor, an attribute editor, a tag editor, a text editor , and a SMIL Object Manager. Among the many editors that make up our system, the temporal relation editor provides users with an intuitive mechanism for representing the conceptual flow of a presentation by simple and direct graphical manipulations . The SMIL Object Manager is responsible for the dynamic modification of each editor. The conceptual temporal relation editor and other editors of our system exchange their information in real-time and automatically generate SMIL codes through the SMIL Object Manager. Together they form an easy and efficient multimedia authoring environment. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a SMIL-based multimedia authoring system and we also propose some ideas to extend the current SMIL specification concerning the reusability of SMIL code.