Events in interactive multimedia applications: modeling and implementation design

A variety of approaches and standards to model multimedia presentations have been proposed. The "interactivity" of these models is often lacking or unsatisfactory. Interactions, however, form an essential part of an interactive multimedia application (IMAP) and need to be reflected in the modeling and presentation of multimedia scenarios. A complex modeling of interaction elements must cover all possible interactions between a user and a computer as well as those interactions between entities within the computer. The authors introduce the notion of events as they are a promising approach for modeling the various interaction elements in IMAPs. They elaborate on an event classification scheme and according to this, an object oriented model for the different types of events in IMAPs. They also propose a rich composition scheme to allow for the definition of complex interactions. They also present the design of a multimedia DBMS client that manages IMAPs and implements the generation, detection and evaluation and processing of such events in the context of the processing of IMAPs.