SIMPEL: a superimposed multimedia presentation editor and player

In a variety of applications such as learning, we need to integrate multimedia information into convenient packages (like presentations). The challenges involved in this process are: Selecting or working with information elements at sub-document level while retaining the original context; describing the integration or packaging of such elements; and making use of minimal storage during this activity.Current multimedia authoring software, like RealProducer (http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/), tend to repeatedly copy information, or to limit granularity of information referenced. Although editors for the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/), such as GRiNS (http://www.oratrix.com/Products/G2E), address some of the aforementioned challenges, they are difficult to use and require considerable training effort before a user can work with them.We developed the Superimposed Multimedia Presentation Editor and Player (SIMPEL), a tool to address these challenges. SIMPEL allows a user to reference information of many types, at varying granularity, without replicating the referenced information. It also allows the user to compose synchronized multimedia presentations. For example, for a specific topic a user can select an audio clip, some images, and some text. He can then "play" (render in specific panes of a window) this information-set in some order. Figure 1 shows a snapshot of a SIMPEL presentation. Pane A contains an audio clip. Panes B, C, and D show selected information within web pages.SIMPEL is in a genre of applications called superimposed applications (SAs), which allow users to superimpose new interpretations over existing or base information [1]. SAs employ "marks", references to selected regions within base information. SIMPEL uses the Superimposed Pluggable Architecture for Contexts and Excerpts (SPARCE), middleware that provides mark management and other services for SAs [2]. SIMPEL has been implemented for Windows in Visual Basic.NET and uses XML for storing presentation data.Future work on SIMPEL will include support for pre-fetching media files (for better performance) and packaging and sharing of SIMPEL presentations. We also plan to index marks and make them searchable, thus facilitating further reuse. A more detailed report on SIMPEL is available at http://pubs.dlib.vt.edu:9090/48/.