<title>Media construction patterns: abstraction and reuse in multimedia application specifications</title>

Modelling Reactive Multimedia: Design and Authoring

“…The Allen temporal relations [2], including parallel and sequential composition, real-time delays, internal and external reactivity are all provided for in MCF. Nanard et al [14,15] fully discuss these matters; we will not repeat the details here. On the other hand, the MCF model does not contain any features whatsoever directly supporting spatial relationships.…”

“…Once again, Nanard et al [14,15] discuss many of these matters in some detail. MCF supports modularity…”

“…Media Construction Formalism [14,15], MCF, is a visual tool for multimedia artifact design. MCF targets multimedia design issues, rather than issues directly associated with implementation or with rendering.…”

“…For the purposes of this paper, it is not necessary to give full details of the roles within the various MCAs, since our purpose here is to illustrate the use of MCF in a design. Equally, details of the semantics of the various MCA classes (Iteration, Behavior and so on) are unnecessary for the purposes of this paper, but may be found in Nanard et al [14,15]. Figure 3 reveals the internal structure of the MCA .…”

“…At the same time and despite their apparent differences, all three approaches share the goal of providing the author with an appropriate tool for the creation of relatively complex multimedia artifacts, and therefore one should expect to learn from a comparison of the three approaches. Two of the three approaches that we will discuss are the subject of work by the authors of this paper, and comprise on the one hand a graphical tool, MCF (Multimedia Construction Formalism), speciÞcally created for the design of multimedia documents [14,15] and on the other a powerful general purpose programming language, Haskell, to which has been added a special purpose library, Fran [5,6,16], which one can view as a domain-speciÞc embedded language. The third approach we will discuss is SMIL 2.0 [23], the W3C framework for describing time-based multimedia documents.…”