A proposed extension of the ODA document model for the processing of multimedia documents

With more and more high capacity graphic workstations on the user's desk and with increasing bandwidth of public and research data networks, there is a growing need for the processing of multimedia documents. Although ODA (variously called office document architecture or open document architecture) already accounts for other media types than just formatted text-namely raster and geometric graphics-future multimedia documents could contain not only those content portions, but also complex new ones like audio or video sequences, which have an additional time dimension in comparison to text or graphics. Within the framework of the MultimETH multimedia conferencing project the authors propose an extension that introduces time to the ODA model, thus adding time constraints and synchronization functionality to the document architecture. They also formally embed the extension into the ODA notion.<>