Multimedia Document Systems in Perspectives

166 Pages·1999·1.82 MB·English

by  Peiya Liu

MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENT
SYSTEMS IN PERSPECTIVES
edited by
PeiyaLiu
Siemens Corporate Research
Arif Ghafoor
Purdue University
A Special Issue of
MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS
An International Journal
Volume 8, No. 1 (1999)
....
"
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS
An International Journal
Volume 8, No.1, January 1999
Special Issue: Multimedia Document Systems in Perspectives
Guest Editors: Peiya Liu and Arif Ghafoor
Multimedia Document Systems in Perspectives: Guest Editorial Note .......... .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Peiya Liu and Arif Gh afoor
A Multimedia Authoring-in-the-Large Environment to Support Complex Product
Documentation .................. Liang H. Hsu, Peiya Liu and Tim Dawidowsky 7
Building a Hybrid Database Application for Structured Documents ............ .
................................. Klemens Bjjhm, Karl Aberer and Wolfgang Klas 61
Dynamic Resource Allocation for Multimedia Document Retrieval over High
Speed LANs ... Husni Fahmi, Shahab Baqai, Ahmed Bashandy and ArifGhafoor 87
Document Scripting with Open Standards: Transport of Application Behavior for
Interactive Technical Documents .............................. David W. Cooper III
The Mobile Agent Paradigm Meets Digital Document Technology: Designing for
Autonomous Media Collection ........ Benjamin Falchuk and Ahmed Karmouch 133
ISBN 978-1-4613-7357-5 ISBN 978-1-4615-5175-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-5175-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress.
Copyright © 1999 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1999
AII rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Printed on acid-free paper.
,~., Multimedia Tools and Applications 8, 5-10 (1999)
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands.
Multimedia Document Systems in Perspectives:
Guest Editorial Note
Emerging multimedia applications will require the creation, storage, access and manage
ment of large archives of complex multimedia documents. These applications target vari
ous fields including medicine, business, digital libraries, education and distance learning,
manufacturing and production, CAD/CAE/CAI, etc. A multimedia document may consist
of diverse data types including text, image, audio, and video. These documents are ei
ther archived at a central repository or are distributed over various servers connected by
broadband networks. Management and communication of multimedia documents poses
considerable technical challenges in the following areas: modeling of multimedia data,
designing efficient document search mechanisms and intelligent user interface, providing
access to distributed multimedia documents, broadband networking for document delivery,
LANIMANIWA N architectures for multimedia communication, synchronization protocols,
and coordination between distributed sites.
Have documents provided a grand unification theory for multimedia data?
Electronic documents are a rich collection of multimedia information components which
need to be processed, transported across networks, and managed. Multimedia information
components may be viewed as having three logical dimensions of content in multimedia
information space, namely media, structure and style. The media parameter describes
whether a document contains static media, such as text, graphics, drawings, images, etc.
or time-based media, such as animation, video, and audio, etc. The structure parameter is
used to organize the media further into the following three major document organizations:
hierarchical, hyperlinked and scheduled. The style parameter determines document appear
ance, layout, presentation behavior for hyperlinked and scheduled structures, and adaptation
on physical display devices. The well-known multimedia formats such as HTML, XML,
PDF, MPEG, VRML, SGML, and HyTime can be uniformly mapped into this framework as
shown in figure 1. Each formats actually contain different degree of information ingredients
in each representation axis.
Management and delivery of multimedia documents poses considerable technical chal
lenges to developers. Different requirements are imposed on documents at each stage of
a multimedia document life cycle, as shown in figure 2. An integrated view is essential
to form a solid foundation for developing stable multimedia information environments.
Several quality requirements need to be addressed for distributed multimedia documents.
These include synchronization as well as quality of service guarantees.
Synchronization can be built in the spatiotemporal domain. A multimedia system must
satisfy some temporal constraints among various objects in order to make the multimedia
6 LIU AND GHAFOOR
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2
GUEST EDITORIAL 7
presentation meaningful for a user. Multimedia data tends to have highly variable bandwidth
requirements with respect to time. A simple way to synchronize such data is to pre-fetch
large amounts in advance at the display site. A less drastic method to fulfill synchronization
requirements is to make advance reservation of network resources to ensure the meeting
of peak bandwidth requirements. Static reservation schemes are simple to implement but
may cause resource wastage. Dynamic allocation based on demand of bandwidth are more
efficient at the expense of greater complexity in management protocols for the network.
Another potential problem in dynamic schemes is the introduction of excessive connection
set-up latencies.
Quality of service is affected by networking parameters. Quality parameters specify
the desired quality of presentation of multimedia information. Often, the users themselves
may provide the levels of acceptable degradation in their multimedia sessions to be used
as quality parameters. Loss of data for a multimedia object can affect the presentation
rate or display resolution for that object. Due to resource constraints, a system may not be
able to provide the desired level of quality of service. Under such circumstances, dynamic
negotiation between the system and the end-users may be useful.
This special issue on multimedia document systems is devoted to above-mentioned re
search areas, with the emphasis on existing systems, tools and applications. The selection of
papers represents a moving focus on the wide spectrum of a document life cycle, including
the phases of document authoring, storage, delivery and presentation.
In the first paper of this issue entitled "A Multimedia Authoring-in-the-Large Environ
ment to Support Complex Product Documentation" by Liang H. Hsu et aI., the authors
present a new paradigm for multimedia document authoring to support large-scaled indus
trial technical documentation. An industrial-strength multimedia authoring environment
requires a high degree of automation support for producing a large amount of high-quality
technical documentation efficiently and effectively, and provides a consistent user interface
to facilitate viewing and browsing of large-scaled technical contents. Product documenta
tion includes technical information in all media for all aspects of a product during the life
cycle of the product. Product documents are highly cross-referenced and often shared by
a family of related product models. Previous authoring paradigms have their limitations in
supporting such complex technical documentation required for today's sophisticated prod
ucts. The authors' approach is based on an authoring-in-the-Iarge paradigm by adopting
formal configuration specifications for automatically assembling machine-specific manuals
from component documents, and formal hyperlink specifications for systematically creat
ing hyperlinks in highly cross-referenced technical manuals. Integrated media viewers are
provided to support viewing, browsing and navigation of large-scaled hyperlinked multi
media documents in a consistent manner for various product-related applications such as
operation, maintenance and training on various platforms such as UNIX, PClWindows,
laptops and hand-held devices locally and over network
The second paper entitled "Building A Hybrid Database Application for Structured Docu
ments" by Klemens Bohm et al. proposes a data-internal representation for SGML/HyTime
documents based on object-oriented database technology with the following features: of ar
bitrary type can be administered. The semantics of architectural forms is reflected by means
of methods that are part of the database schema and by the database-internal representation
3
8 LID AND GHAFOOR
of HyTime-specific characteristics. The framework includes mechanisms to ensure con
formance of documents to the HyTime standards. Measures for improved performance of
HyTime operations are also described. The database-internal representation of documents
is a hybrid between a completely structured and a flat representation. The structured rep
resentation is better in supporting the HyTime semantics and modifications of document
components. It is demonstrated that most operations are faster for the flat representation.
The next paper entitled "Dynamic Resource Allocation for Multimedia Document Re
trieval over High Speed LANs" by Husni Fahmi et al. dwells upon how the emergence
of gigabit local area network (GLANs) has spurred a tremendous interest in supporting
networked multimedia applications over LAN. In this paper, the authors propose a mech
anism for dynamically allocating network resources in asynchronous LANs. Presentation
of multimedia objects in these applications with required play-out quality requires Quality
of Service (QoS) guarantees by the underlying networking infrastructure. Existing asyn
chronous LAN s such as Ethernet, do not support the notion QoS due to their asynchronous
media access protocol. For such networks, the authors propose a dynamic bandwidth man
agement scheme that uses the concept of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). Signifi
cant performance improvement is observed through experimental results. In particular, the
transmission rates for multimedia hosts improve significantly with low jitter variations in
media streams. The authors also propose a framework for graceful degradation of play-out
quality of multimedia objects in case the LAN's total capacity is not sufficient to meet the
overall demand.
"Document Scripting with Open Standards" by David W. Cooper looks at how the trans
port of application behavior for interactive technical documents is different from the highly
evolved and refined traditions of paper publishing. The models for both storing and pre
senting computer-based interactive documents are rapidly changing. It is imperative that
standards for application-neutral, interchangeable and self-describing information content
be applied if one is to maintain the value of electronic technical documents throughout the
life time of the systems that they describe. In addition, for these types of documents it is im
portant that the application behavior-control logic that governs how an interactive document
acts is recorded. This paper addresses the interaction between electronic documents and
presentation software that renders them, focusing on the scripting of interactive behavior.
The concepts are illustrated using an application of the SGML standard called the Metafile
for Interactive Documents (MID) developed for US Navy to improve interoperability of
Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs).
The final paper entitled "The Mobile Agent Paradigm Meets Digital Document Tech
nology: Designing for Autonomous Media Collection" by B. Falchuk et al. focuses on
the emergence of mobile agents as a new paradigm for computing and are roving to be
more flexible and dynamic than the average client in the client-server model. In the mobile
agent model the program is sent to and runs on, the remote machine, thereby operating
closer to and more interactively with the remote document resource. While for the most
part industry is currently cautious, research laboratories have embraced the concept and ef
fective prototypes have emerged. AgentSys is one such mobile agent system developed by
the Agent Group at the Multimedia information Research Lab. This prototype implements
the protocols (AgentTask, AgentTransact, and AgentTransfer) necessary to allow agents to
4
GUEST EDITORIAL 9
autonomously room around a network of digital resource, collect information intermittently
and return to the user with results. While both network bandwidth and user search time can
be reduced using the mobile agent paradigm such a system requires protocols at the agent
language, ontology, transfer and application levels. The authors propose: (i) an agent-stack
to enable a mobile agent system, (ii) the agent protocols necessary for agent-digital doc
ument interaction, (iii) a profound new way of thinking of documents within the mobile
agent paradigm, and (iv) solutions to critical issues in mobile agent transfer of multimedia
mobile agent cargo and novel techniques for the specification of agent behavior within the
document task. A brief quantitative analysis of the Web surfing paradigm versus the mobile
agent paradigm is included to justify claims of network traffic savings using agents.
Peiya Liu
Siemens Corporate Research
Princeton, NJ 08854
<[email protected]>
Arif Ghafoor
Purdue University
West Lafayette, TN 47907
<[email protected]>
Peiya Liu is a senior member of technical staff at Multimedia/Video Technology Department. Siemens Corporate
Research, Inc., Peiya received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of texas at Austin in 1986. He
has many years of experience in applications of multimedia documents in industrial environments. His primary
interests are in the areas of multimedia document authoring/processing/management. multimedia tools. innovative
industrial applications and standards.
He is currently the standards section editor of IEEE Multimedia and on the editorial board of Journal of
Multimedia Tools and Applications.
Arif Ghafoor received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Pakistan in 1976. and the M.S., M.Phil.
and Ph.D. from Columbia University, in 1977, 1980, and 1985, respectively. In Spring 1991. he joined the faculty
5
10 LID AND GHAFOOR
of the School of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, where he is an Associate Professor. Prior to joining
Purdue University, he was on the faculty of Syracuse University, since 1984. His research interests include parallel
and distributed systems and multimedia information systems. He has published over 80 technical papers in these
areas, in leading journals and conferences. Currently, he is directing a project in distributed multimedia systems
at Purdue University. His research in these areas has been funded by the DARPA, the NSF, NYNEX, AT&T, Fuji
Electric Corp., and General Electric Co.
He has served on the program committees of various IEEE conferences. He has been invited to give tutorials
and seminars in the area of multimedia systems, at many leading national and international conferences. Currently,
he is serving on the editorial boards of Multimedia Systems (ACMlSpringer-Verlag Publishers), the Journal on
Multimedia Tools and Applications, and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Databases. He is also a Guest
Editor and Co-Guest Editor of special issues of various journals including Multimedia Systems (Nov. 1995), the
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (Dec. 1995), the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications
(1996), the Journal on Multimedia Tools and Applications (1996) and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and
Data Engineering (1998). These special issues are on various aspects of multimedia information systems. He is
a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of Eta Kappa Nu.
6
•• Multimedia Tools and Applications 8,11-64 (1999)
I'llii" © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands.
A Multimedia Authoring-in-the-Large Environment
to Support Complex Product Documentation
LIANGH. HSU [email protected]
PEIYALIU
Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey
TIM DA WIDOWSKY
Siemens Energieerzeugung KWU, Muelheim, Germany
Abstract. In this paper, we present a new paradigm for multimedia document authoring to support large-scaled
industrial technical documentation. An industrial-strength multimedia authoring environment requires a high
degree of automation support for producing a large amount of high-quality technical documentation efficiently
and effectively, and provides a consistent user interface to facilitate viewing and browsing of large-scaled technical
contents. Product documentation includes technical information in all media for all aspects of a product during
the life cycle of the product. Product documents are highly cross-referenced and often shared by a family of
related product models. Previous authoring paradigms have their limitations in supporting such complex technical
documentation required for today's sophisticated products. Our approach is based on an authoring-in-the-large
paradigm by adopting formal configuration specifications for automatically assembling machine-specific product
manuals from component documents, and fonnal hyperlink specifications for systematically creating hyperlinks in
highly cross-referenced technical documents. Integrated media-specific viewers are provided to support viewing,
browsing and navigation of large-scaled hyperlinked multimedia contents in a consistent manner for various
product-related applications such as operation, maintenance and training on various platfonns such as UNIX,
PClWindows, laptops and hand-held devices locally and over network.
Keywords: authoring-in-the-large, SGML conversion, component document, document database, product man
ual composition, product manual configuration specification, document evaluation, document transformation,
incremental composition, AIU extraction, AIU structure specification, automatic hyperlinking, hyperlink speci
fication, incremental hyperlinking, hyperlink management, large-scaled document browsing, hyperlink browser,
multimedia document annotator, multimedia document mailer, card-based document browsing, form-based doc
ument browsing, network-based document delivery
1. Introduction
Due to the complexity and sophistication of technological products being manufactured
and operated nowadays, a large amount of documentation that provides instructions and
relevant technical information for properly operating and maintaining the products has
become an integral part of the products, For example. the documentation for a gas turbine
alone comprises several thousand pages, while the documentation needed for a power plant
with all the product manuals for gas or steam turbines, generator, boiler, electrical and I&C
equipment, mechanical equipment, etc, fills many shelves. Use of these documents during
maintenance and repair work or in the event of system failure is extremely time-critical.
The scope of technical details needed to solve a problem often fills pages after pages,