Open architecture multimedia documents

Abstract

An open architecture multimedia document publication system is described which integrates a number of different representation technologies to provide a medium offering a wide spectrum of usage, from emulation of current paper publication, through electronic document delivery, multimedia inclusion of video and sound, structured hypermedia linkage, and formal knowledge representation supporting simulation and inference. The research is targeted on exploring new forms of scholarly communication, and the publication system supports collaborative document development, the authentication of disseminated material, and the citation, annotation and reuse of such material. The document publication system provides a rich word processing and page makeup environment with all the facilities normally expected, and adds multimedia, hypermedia and computational facilities incrementally and naturally, with careful attention to the usability of the human-computer interface. The result is an interactive document in which knowledge is represented in a variety of ways, some targeted on human interaction, some targeted on computational analysis, simulation and inference, and such that the document can be printed as a conventional paper or book losing the dynamic aspects of the material but retaining the visual representation.