Its about time: link streams as continuous metadata

As enabling technologies become available there is an increasing use of temporal media streams, such as audio and video, within a hypertext context. In this paper we present the rationale and requirements for delivering continuous metadata alongside the media stream, and focus on linking as our case study. We consider the mechanism for delivery of the metadata across a distributed system, the format and content of the metadata flow itself, and the presentation of the media and augmenting metadata to the user. Two initial proof of concept applications have been developed to demonstrate these concepts, which we describe. Finally we propose a framework for highly distributed delivery and processing of multicast continuous metadata, as a part of the infrastructure necessary to provide a more complete multimedia environment for hypermedia systems.