Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

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Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?
ABany combo of text, art, sound, animation, and video delivered to you by computer or other electronic or digitally manipulated meansmultimediamultimedia is ____ _____ textdigitally manipulatedwhen you allow an end user to control what and when the elements are deliveredinteractive multimediawhen you provide a structure of linked elements throught which the user can navigate, interactive media becomeshypermediathe weaving part of multimedia definition where source documents merge into a final presentationintegrated multimediathe sum of what gets played back and how it is presented to the viewergraphical user interface (GUI)melding of computer-based multimedia with entertainment and games-based mediaconvergencea browser is used to viewweb based pages and documentsthe ROM in CD-ROM stands forread-only memorythe software vehicle, the messages, and the content presented on a computer or television screen together make upa multimedia projecta project that is shipped or sold to consumers or end users, typically in a box or sleeve or on the internet, with or without instructions, isa multimedia titleThe 19th-century Russian composer who used an orchestra, a piano, a chorus, and a special color organ to synthesize music and color in his 5th Symphony, Prometheus was:ScriabinAccording to one source, in interactive multimedia presentations where you are really involved, the retention rate is as high as:60%Which of the following is displayable on a web page after installation of a browser plug-inAdobe FlashPDA stands forpersonal digital assistantDVD stands forDigital Versitile DiscAt one time, the technology that brought the greater amount of multimedia to the classroom was the:laser disk

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

While the AHM, together with the CMIFed environment, provide a powerful way to create hypermedia presentations, it is clear that making “pleasing” presentations will remain a complex task. The gathering and editing of source materials, the definition of links in a document, and the aesthetic aspects of combining a variety of media in a useful manner remain major hurdles to the production of effective hypermedia presentations. Although we feel the AHM can provide a solid basis for encoding hypermedia documents, the artistic effort required for effective use of the media available on modern workstations should not be underestimated.

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Zoomable user interfaces as a medium for slide show presentations

Lance Good, Benjamin B. Bederson, in The Craft of Information Visualization, 2003

Improved overview support

Spatial, hierarchical overviews of hypermedia networks have been demonstrated to improve recall of overview titles when compared to both hypermedia with linear overviews and hypermedia without overviews.34 This suggests that displaying a more overt and meaningful spatial overview during a presentation may increase the memorability and possibly the comprehensibility, of high-level presentation concepts. Similarly, overviews have been shown to improve the understanding of concept maps (see Figure 5) over several disconnected views in subjects with low spatial abilities.11 Consequently, including these spatial overviews in the presentation may improve the comprehension of presentation material in certain individuals.

Overviews are intrinsic to ZUIs. One of the previously mentioned capabilities of ZUIs is the ability to zoom out to get more context. As a result, it is always possible in a ZUI to zoom out so that all presentation data, or localized subsets of that data, are in view. Whether these overviews convey meaningful information, of course, depends on the structure of the presentation. Nevertheless, this overview visualization capability exists at arbitrary magnifications in the presentation without any additional effort or input from the presenter.

Here again, the authors had the option of making the overview persistent, that is, visible on all slides at all times. However, this was not explored as a design alternative because of the screen real estate it would sacrifice. In addition, such an overview could be a continual distraction in the context of a presentation.

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Introduction to Authoring Systems

Dick C.A. Bulterman, in Readings in Multimedia Computing and Networking, 2002

OVERVIEW OF PAPERS

This chapter contains six papers that illustrate the approaches that have had significant impact in the general area of authoring systems.

I start with two papers on languages for describing the hypermedia structure of presentations. The first is “The Amsterdam Hypermedia Model,” by L. Hardman, D.C.A. Bulterman, and G. van Rossum. The Amsterdam Hypermedia Model was developed in response to the need for combining basic hypertext technology (as represented by the Dexter Hypertext Model [2]) and spatial and temporal layout for presentations (as represented by the CMIF environment [3]), and for combining these into a unified hypermedia model. The second article, “HDM—A model-based approach to hypertext design,” by F. Gazotto, P. Paolini, and D. Schwabe, describes an alternative approach to structuring hypermedia. The main contribution of this article is the specification of a hyper-structuring model that defines links outside of the source encoding. This allows different semantic models to be associated with one syntactic information base. The work on the HDM is also significant because it was used as the basis of a wide range of practical studies, some of which are discussed in the article.

The remaining papers in this chapter define tools and techniques for addressing detailed aspects of a presentation's construction. “Automatic temporal layout mechanisms,” by M. C. Buchanan and P. T. Zellweger, looks at analytical tools for sequencing objects in a presentation based on their resource requirements and the capabilities of the presentation execution environment. The historical significance of this paper is its view of presenting multimedia in the pre-Web era: It concentrates on algorithms for determining local rather than network-based resource use. This work is complimented by the paper “GRiNS: A graphical interface for creating and playing SMIL documents,” by D.C.A. Bulterman and colleagues, which contains the first description of an environment for building network multimedia presentations based on the Structured Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) [4]. This paper illustrates how the emphasis in multimedia authoring research has shifted to the user-interface aspects of presentation design.

The final two papers consider techniques for high-level and low-level document creation. “Multiviews interfaces multimedia authoring environments,” by M. Jourdan, C. Roisin, and L. Tardif, shows how a presentation can be built based on a system of constraints among objects, constraints that can be analyzed via a number of separate document views. The last paper, “A multimedia system for authoring motion pictures,” by R. Baecker and colleagues, gives a constructionist view of defining and combining objects for creating linear presentations.

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Hyperscalability – The Changing Face of Software Architecture

Ian Gorton, in Software Architecture for Big Data and the Cloud, 2017

2.3.3 Utilize Stateless Services

State management is a much debated and oft misunderstood issue. Many frameworks, for example, the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE), support managing state in the application logic tier by providing explicit abstractions and application programming interfaces (APIs) that load the required state from the database into service instance variables, typically for user session state management. Once in memory, all subsequent requests for that session can hit the same service instance, and efficiently access and manipulate the data that's needed. From a programming perspective, stateful services are convenient and easy.

Unfortunately, from a scalability perspective, stateful solutions are a poor idea for many reasons. First, they consume server resources for the duration of a session, which may span many minutes. Session lengths are often unpredictable, so having many (long-lived) instances on some servers and few on others may create a load imbalance that the system must somehow manage. If a system's load is not balanced, then it has underutilized resources and its capacity cannot be fully utilized. This inhibits scalability and wastes money.

In addition, when sessions do not terminate cleanly (e.g., a user does not log out), an instance remains in memory and consumes resources unnecessarily before some inactive timeout occurs and the resources are reclaimed. Finally, if a server becomes inaccessible due to failure or a network partition, you need some logic, somewhere, to handle the exception and recreate the state on another server.

As we build systems that must manage many millions of concurrent sessions, stateful services become hard to scale. Stateless services, where any service instance can serve any request in a timely fashion, are the scalable solution. There main approach to building stateless systems requires the client to pass a secure session identifier with each request. This identifier becomes the unique key that identifies the session state that is maintained by the server in a cache or database. This state is accessed as needed when new client requests for the session arrive. This allows client request to be served by any stateless server in a replicated server farm. If a server fails while servicing a request, the client can reissue the request to be processed by another server, which leverages the shared session state. Also, new server nodes can be started at any time to add capacity. Finally, if a client becomes inactive on a session, the state associated with that session can simple be discarded (typically based on some timeout value), and the session key invalidated.

As examples, RESTful interfaces are stateless and communicate conversational state using hypermedia links [20]. Netflix's hyperscalable architecture is built upon a foundation of stateless services,23 and Amazon's AWS cloud platform promotes stateless services to deliver scalability.24

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Interoperability, Interface and Hypertext

Fabrice Papy, in Digital Libraries, 2016

2.8 Tools for hypertext and tools for Web users

The results of scientific works and studies on the appropriation of hypertext and hypermedia projects finally stress the place that digital technologies should have. The historic research of Vannevar Bush on the NLS/Augment30, between 1950 and 1962, underlines the important role – though not central – of these technologies, real cognitive orthosis that should augment, but not supplement31, human activity. Despite the sophistication of the new productions and the spectacular character of the achievements32, it is a matter of entrusting technical environments with the task of automating human actions inspired by intuition, idea, decision, etc. Hypertext accompanies the idea of an instrumentation that remains under the control of its user and its intellectual line: “Hypertext and other electronic information systems overcome human limitations by providing mechanisms for compact storage and rapid retrieval of enormous volumes of textual, numeric and visual data. The importance of the systems lies in their potential capacity to augment and amplify intellect” [MAR 88, p. 70].

Due to the evolution of information technologies and the limitless power of computers, delegating human decisions to technological artifacts tends to become normal even in daily tasks: finding the best price for a service or product, proposing similar or complementary products, finding the quickest route either by car or by public transportation, signaling traffic disruptions, booking a restaurant that offers exclusively regional dishes within a 500 m perimeter, etc.

The model of decision and responsibility promoted by hypertext is precisely opposite to the delegating tendency and it attempts to retain the tools that remain under the user's control and are conducive to “augmenting and amplifying the intellect”. Numerous scientific works (psychology, sciences of education, information sciences, semiotics, etc.) have confirmed that disorientation and cognitive problems inevitably encountered by hypertext users are closely linked with the body of information available in the hypertextual networks and to the reading strategies, which are constantly being reconfigured: “It is a well known fact that hypertext exploration poses many problems: loss of orientation, cognitive overload and dissatisfaction (…) One of the reasons advanced by researchers to explain these problems is the limited span of working memory, which would rapidly become saturated with the amount of elements to be retained during information retrieval (actual page, pages visited, pages to visit, position in the hypertextual network, status of the current search, etc.). A further explanation of these problems is related to the difficulty that users encounter when trying to have a mental representation of the hypertextual space in which they move”.

The solutions proposed for reducing the difficulties of IR in hypertext are directed on the one hand toward the visualization of hypertextual space and on the other hand toward the alternative access to hypertextual reading based on the tree-like structure of the documents with author/reader Trellis hypertext.

These modes of representation and access were integrated into historic prototypes such as MacWeb, Nestor, HyWebMap, etc., and have proved to be easy to use: “One of the objectives of interactive interface development was to give the user the possibility to rely on his/her common sense and knowledge of the world when browsing the abstract field of information. What in the beginning is abstract may become perceivable and be the subject of experience” [ROK 03, p. 113].

Due to the lightning development of the Web of documents, these solutions were outshined by general search engines that imposed an information processing mode on the “questions/answers” pattern. In a context where political, economic and societal stakes were not prominent, if they ever existed, this approach to digital information processing has driven practices to a simplistic mode: “This is why interfaces with general purpose, in terms of content, and universal purpose, in terms of targeted users, are necessary” [MIE 03, p. 29]. Multimedia resources increasingly displayed throughout the global network have put in serious trouble the indexing mechanisms of search engines and this has led to reconsidering the need to dispose of solutions for content exploration and synthetic representation without which resources risk to remain inaccessible in the absence of a description shared by Internet users.

Besides the inescapable input field, the ina.fr site offers the user the possibility to discover digitized videos and sounds, namely around 350,000 documents33 produced by the French radio and television broadcasting. The information is organized under five classes (themes, personalities, programs, features and Web creations), structured into main categories (for example, themes contain 14 main categories: politics, art and culture, sports, entertainment, science and technology, media, advertising, etc.) and subcategories.

These classes, categories and subcategories can be explored in a very elementary way, going from one level of the hierarchy to another, until reaching the final one, where audiovisual resources are represented [GES 02]. At this level, a hypertextual logic of transversality can be reintroduced for the resources presented in several subcategories. The path followed through categories and subcategories in the tree structure is given by an “Ariadne's thread” (distinct from the history). It is highlighted on the fly in the browsing interface of the Website and shows the user the depth of level he has reached. This Ariadne's thread is itself interactive and permits the user to go back at any moment to a higher level in the tree diagram. These location methods may seem insufficient given the stakes of user browsing and valorization of digital collections. A disoriented Internet user is not only at risk of abandoning current browsing, but also of putting the site into quarantine. These location indications find no place in the websites, except for intrusive approaches, as the majority of Web designers and computer graphic designers perceive them as external constraints that corrupt the original visual and ergonomic identity of their work.

While the tree-like organization tends to reduce the Internet users' drift, additional information on the density of resources at a certain level and on the possible links with other categories of the same level can contribute to a complete browsing (Figure 2.2). It is from now on possible to dynamically generate such graphical representations in order to assist the user in his browsing (Figure 2.3) and to spare his working memory.

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 2.2. One of the numerous représentations obtained with GEPHI, an open-source network analysis and visualization software, developed in Java. The application uses a 3D rendering engine, combines integrated functionalities and a flexible architecture in order to explore, analyze, spatialize, filter and regroup all types of networks. While it is not dynamically usable for the Web, processing results can be subjected to interactive exports due to an HTML5/CSS/Javascript combination. The representations generated by GEPHI correspond to an important need to process a huge amount of data available on the Web (data.gouv.fr, www.data.gov) and make hidden properties visible. These visualization tools, complementary to statistical tools, are known to facilitate reasoning and analyses

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 2.3. A work that essentially uses Javascript and CSS (Jquery). Each circle (here representing a term) is interactive and returns in another part of the interface (not represented here) the list of documents attached

These graphical possibilities are natively available in recent browsers that have integrated the most recent recommendations of W3 relative to the cascading style sheet34 (CSS): “Another advantage of CSS is that aesthetic changes to the graphic design of a document (or hundreds of documents) can be applied quickly and easily”35. Until the recent past, despite the real interest in the visualization of information (which grew in importance in the operating systems with graphical user interface), the technical complexities of their implementation have prevented them from being commonly used in the websites (Figure 2.4).

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 2.4. Example of a word cloud. This visual représentation of the words in a document (or a set of documents) gives an idea on their importance (relevance). The more significant the word, the bigger the font. This cloud representation is particularly interesting when term copresence is significant. As copresence calculations may be complex due to the number of documents and terms, they are rarely integrated in the visualization offered by websites, which privilege display immediacy over any other preoccupation

Elaborated graphical propositions frequently required preliminary installation of additional modules (Java 3D plugin, Flash player and SVG) whose functioning was uncertain, given the available browsers (Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera, K-meleon, Konqueror, Chromium, Galeon, etc.) and the IT platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc.) (Figure 2.5).

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 2.5. A run request issued by a Java virtual machine for the visualization of a word cloud (http://www.wordle.net). Several issues such as security questions, the need to update software versions, numerous bugs in the plugins and applications, etc., have prevented designers from implementing information visualization in websites, which would have improved browsing through websites information space

In the case of enterprises present on the global Web, their sites' visual identity and functionalities have to simultaneously distinguish themselves from other sites and avoid exposing the Internet users to browsing comprehension difficulties that may lead them to abandon browsing in favor of a competing site. The designers of these online devices focus their entire intelligence on providing Internet users with the functionalities they commonly use and giving them a sense of originality that will lead them to participate in a novel “User Experience” while interacting with a site which essentially offers the same services as other similar sites. The autonomy of the Internet user–client is subtly revisited in these commercial sites so that he/she is progressively exposed to different browsing projects, led to various places on the site where new products, new services, etc., can be discovered. Ingenious methods are applied to transform initial autonomous browsing into an assisted visit where the risk of disorientation is skillfully eliminated.

In the case of patrimonial, scientific, educational or institutional digital libraries, there is no question of using subterfuges to obtain ownership of the Internet users' browsing. The online resources in these documentary architectures are part of a declared political project of “Society of Information” in which the states make sure that all the information citizens need is being provided and made accessible – all sources being treated equally [KIY 09, ARN 06, MAT 05]. Being concerned by social justice and willing to bridge the digital gap, governments have the obligation to propose information that contributes to everybody improving their quality of life while respecting their rights and duties. A common fonction of the digital libraries financed by governmental programs is to make their resources accessible so that every individual may use them according to his own culture, capacities, needs, interests and aspirations.

They all valorize content in order to respond to a diversity of expectations, needs and digital practices of the Internet users. This attempt to valorize digital collections should not be assimilated with the excesses of marketing promotion, but rather with the will to meet the Internet users and inform them about the existence of qualified resources that may meet their demands. The use and usability of libraries, archives and repositories can thus be expressed as follows: “With increasing online information sources, users have more and more choices even for a single information task. This substitution effect of different information sources is not well-considered in the design process of digital libraries. User studies of most digital libraries were targeted at specific interfaces without considering the rich information environment the users are situated in and the myriad of competing information sources surrounding them (…) A gap exists in current digital library design practices in which a digital library is disconnected from its targeted user community. Many digital libraries are losing their users; users have learned how to use search engines to access open Web content of collective knowledge of a wider mass, but not digital library content which may require more effort in locating the digital library's entry point. Thus, search engines have disintermediated many digital library interfaces and their related evaluation and usability efforts” [PAN 14, p. 196].

Given their common stakes, these documentary devices should share the modes of organization and description that facilitate the access, reading, extraction and reconstruction of spaces of information and knowledge adapted to the Internet user. By highlighting the power of ICT, digital libraries place themselves in contrast with physical libraries, by discrediting their limited spaces for obsolescence, uncomfortable accessibility and sets of shelves full of bulky works that are difficult to renew [PAN 96]: “A university library can in itself be considered a system that regroups several subsystems of complex information, and in which individuals search through, select, sort out and process information of various natures. Our study aims at responding to a demand addressed by the university library of Metz concerning the reorganization of the existing signaling system. This system is obsolete and insufficient and does not respond to the users' orientation and information needs” [LAL 07, p. 1].

This brutal parallel between the innovative technological features of digital libraries and the physical characteristics of traditional libraries does not place the latter in an advantageous light, though they offer modes of organization of universally shared collections [BEG 05]: “In the interwar period, documentation progressively became a new field of activity in France, in which persons willing to transmit knowledge activate. This new profession, linked to Scientific and Technical Information, emerged as a result of the reasoning, will and sustained action of men and women in the service of knowledge” [MAG 85, p. 5].

Common to all libraries, the fact that works are gathered in a disciplinary field or under the same theme reflects an intellectual or educational project expressed in a cumulative pattern of knowledge. From this reasoned accumulation and conservation of works that form an assembly, structures of meaning are eventually born [JAC 01, NAU 00, BOW 99]. In this sense, the organization of collections reveals the objective projects of knowledge organization carried by the wide classifications instantiated by any library, irrespective of size or nature of its collections: “Classifications are powerful technologies. Embedded in working infrastructures they become relatively invisible without losing any of that power” [BOW 99, p. 319]. Beyond scholarly logic elaborated and used only by the initiated, these intellectual documentary techniques are extremely relevant when going from generic to specific, and vice versa [SAL 72].

Such intellectual methods can be mobilized in the approach of documentary artifacts of digital libraries and could become common tools for exploration and discovery purposes.

As an example, the Visual Catalog presents itself as a way to bring specificity and facilitate comprehension of the libraries' plural complexity (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). Previous to its conception, several features were mentioned as most prominent: the device highlighted the main directions in terms of knowledge organization within the library, revealed the productive proximity of analytical and systematic indexing, facilitated the learning of indexing and classification languages and finally displayed on a unique screen, in a synthetic manner, the global coherence of a system for knowledge organization in order to contribute to the development of real documentary competences concurring to the users' autonomy.

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 2.6. Theme-based exploration of the Visual Catalog (http://www.titralog.com). The left column shows all the themes associated with the big divisions of the Dewey Decimal Classification. In this example, it is the “600” division relative to technologies that was selected and it contains 2,949 resources. The upper section of the right column presents the works associated with one of the categories (657.45 “Auditing” counts six works). The lower section mentions all the keywords of the six works under the 657.45 index

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 2.7. Keyword-based exploration of the Visual Catalog (http://www.titralog.com). The left column shows a comprehensive list of all the keywords with a selected initial (here P). The upper section of the right column indicates the works associated with a term. In this example, the term “philosophy of language” specifies 53 resources organized in themes that are shown in the lower framework (theory of philosophy, significance, interpretation, hermeneutics, epistemology, etc.). An exploratory reading, with a tree-based functioning (generic themes and alphabet letters), can change into a transversal and hypertextual reading due to the interactivity of indices of the section “Theme” and the classification marks of each resource

Staging metadata referring to the organization (classification) and descriptions (subject indexing) of the physical and digital resources of the libraries/media libraries, this device attempts to meet the users' needs, among which the capacity to browse the collection of documents while maintaining the global view of structuration: “To be able to take ownership of the information sourced by the collection of documents, the user needs to be provided with the means to comprehend it in its entirety” [TRI 06, p. 15].

Today, digital libraries materialize the most remarkable technological advances of a society decidedly orientated toward information and knowledge. The availability and accessibility aimed at by the designers of these sophisticated documentary devices are seriously endangered by the difficulties encountered by the users and shown, though rarely, by pluridisciplinary studies of use. To avoid the situation where an important part of the digital libraries' collections of documents remains unused, similarly to the traditional libraries, it is imperative to stop privileging the technological direction and rethink the design of devices so that they respond to their users' activities.

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RESTful IoT Authentication Protocols

H.V. Nguyen, L. Lo Iacono, in Mobile Security and Privacy, 2017

7 Conclusion and Outlook

REST has established itself as an important architectural style for developing large-scale hypermedia distributed system. In IoT environments, the principles and constraints of REST have been adopted by several application domains including CoAP- and RACS-based systems. Other IoT areas with prospective RESTful protocols will eventually arise likewise. The increasing implementation of the REST concept in various technologies, as well as application domains, and the insufficient protection of transport-oriented protection demand generic security approaches augmenting REST on the same abstraction layer.

This chapter therefore proposes an approach that extends REST by an authentication scheme while remaining on the same abstraction layer of REST itself. This security scheme then serves as a guideline for implementing message authentication for RESTful (IoT) protocols. Based on this guideline, this chapter introduces a REST message authentication scheme for two RESTful protocols for the IoT domain, CoAP and RACS, respectively.

REMA, RECMA, and RERMA provide integrity and authenticity, as well as non-repudiation for REST messages and RESTful protocol when using asymmetric signature algorithms in conjunction with an appropriate public key infrastructure. Still, in order to approach a comprehensive message security, confidentiality must be considered as well. In layered systems, this security service is of specific importance, as many intermediate systems, such as cache servers, load balancers or content delivery networks are operated by third-party services. If REST messages are not encrypted, those intermediate services have plain-text access to traversing messages. This is especially critical for IoT environments, as sensitive information is transferred from node to node. Therefore a REST message confidentiality scheme needs to be developed. This scheme must follow the introduced methodology by defining a guideline for adopting and implementing confidentiality services for RESTful technologies including HTTP, CoAP, RACS, and prospective RESTful protocols (see Fig. 8).

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Fig. 8. General RESTful message confidentiality and its instantiation to concrete RESTful protocols.

Following this methodology, further security components for the REST-Security stack in Fig. 4 can be developed. All these steps will be elaborated in further work in order to build a generic and robust security framework for mission-critical REST-based (IoT) systems.

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Modeling interface content and navigation

Marco Brambilla, Piero Fraternali, in Interaction Flow Modeling Language, 2015

5.11 Bibliographic Notes

Modeling the content of interfaces is a relatively new subject. Its academic roots can be traced back to a few pioneering design models proposed in the past for hypermedia applications such as HDM (Hypermedia Design Model) [GPS93], OOHDM (Object Oriented HDM) [SR95], and RMM (Relationship Management Methodologies) [ISB95]. The first hypermedia model to gain acceptance was the Dexter Model [HBR94], a model providing a uniform terminology for representing the different primitives offered by hypertext construction systems. In the Dexter Model, components describe the pieces of information that constitute the hypertext, and links represent navigable paths. Many subsequent proposals in the hypermedia field started from the Dexter Model and added more sophisticated modeling primitives, formal semantics, and structured development processes. For example, HDM adds more complex forms of hypertext organization and more powerful navigation primitives to capture the semantics of hypermedia applications. RMM proposes a modeling language built upon the Entity-Relationship model and goes further in the definition of a structured method for hypermedia design. OOHDM takes inspiration from object-oriented modeling by adding specific classes for modeling advanced navigation features. It also exploits classical object-oriented concepts and notations in the design process.

The advent of the web as an application development architecture has sparked new interest in platform-independent modeling of the front end as a means for overcoming the proliferation of the implementation technologies and nonstandard extensions of web languages. The Autoweb system was the first system demonstrating the fully automatic generation of complex web application from a model of the front end [FP00]. Among the several languages and systems proposed in the literature, the Web Modeling Language (WebML) reached industrial maturity, being employed in the development of applications since 2000 [BBC03]. WebML describes the composition of the (web) interface using domain-specific concepts, such as site views, areas, pages, areas, content units, and links. The language includes a set of predefined content publishing components and allows developers to extend the core set with their own components.

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Enterprise Integration and Management in Agile Organizations

F.B. Vernadat, in Agile Manufacturing: The 21st Century Competitive Strategy, 2001

6.3. OPAL

OPAL is a software platform for integrated information and process management dedicated to design and manufacturing environments [22]. OPAL has been developed as an ESPRIT project as part of the AIT initiative. As opposed to AIT-IP, which is developed as a generic approach, OPAL takes advantage of modern existing technologies for information management and sharing including object request brokers (ORBs), object-oriented database technology, neutral product and process data exchange formats (such as ISO STEP and WfMC WPDL), workflow engines, hypermedia technology, HTML and the world-wide web (WWW) and web browsers.

The global system architecture of OPAL is presented by Figure 10. It consists of a data repository, an execution environment based on a workflow engine as well as a middle-ware layer (object request broker) and central services for system-wide message and object exchange and interoperability.

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Figure 10. OPAL general architecture

The enterprise repository contains business process, organization and data models to be used to control business support applications. Process models and data models are stored using a common object-oriented data structure. Each application package (e.g. CAD, PDM or MRP system) must be encapsulated using its application program interface (API) to become a functional entity of the integrated system (thanks to the encapsulation services). It can then be accessed by other modules via the middle-ware layer (in this case ORBIX, a CORBA compliant platform) and the central services (providing naming services, time services, communication services and information services). Since this integrating infrastructure is dedicated to engineering and manufacturing data management, it also provides so-called virtual folder system services and uses WWW-browser facilities to deal with complex product data and compound hypertext documents.

Virtual folders are used to collect and transmit technical documents (e.g. CAD drawings, bills-of-materials, product documentation, simulation data, text files, etc.) put together as one document and to be exchanged by users or application systems across the system. Hypermedia facilities and web browsers (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer) provide end-users with the ability to navigate through the whole set of product and process data to which they have access, wherever they are located in the enterprise system.

The specification phase of OPAL took place in 1996, services were developed in 1997 and a prototype and pilot cases made available for the end of 1998. Two industrial test cases have been demonstrated, one at PSA in France and one at Robert Bosch in Germany.

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HDM — A Model-Based Approach to Hypertext Application Design 

FRANCA GARZOTTO, ... DANIEL SCHWABE, in Readings in Multimedia Computing and Networking, 2002

HDM default rules for translating abstract links into concrete links are based on the idea of having a default representative for each abstract object (component or entity). Defining default representatives of entities and components is done by introducing a default perspective for each entity type, and then assuming that the default representative for a component is its unit under the default perspective and the default representative for an entity is the default representative of its root component. This corresponds to saying that the root component of an entity, in its default perspective, “stands” for that entity.

Given this notion, entity-to-entity application links translate into concrete links between their default representatives. Each component-to-component application link is translated into a set of concrete links connecting each unit of the source component to the default representative of the target component.

To illustrate this rule, consider the following situation occurring in a hypermedia music listening guide; “La Traviata-Ouverture” component (of entity “La Traviata” of type “Musical Work”), is linked to “Verdi-1” component (root of entity “Verdi” of type “Author”), through a “Composer of” application link. Consider furthermore that “Author” entity type has perspectives “Picture” (showing the person) and “Text” (with a textual description), while “Musical Work” has “Text” (with the music score) and “Music” perspectives. “Picture” is the default perspective for entity type “Author”.

In the above case, the actual concrete links corresponding to the abstract link connecting the two components, will connect both “La Traviata-Ouverture: Text” unit and “La Traviata-Ouverture: Music” unit to “Verdi-1: Picture” unit. This is an example where one link at the abstract level corresponds to two concrete navigable links. The situation is illustrated in Figure 2.

Is the structure of linked elements through which a user can navigate inactive multimedia?

Fig. 2. Example of translation from abstract to concrete links.

The default rule for component-to-component structural links translation is the following: if a component C1 has a structural link to a component C2, then, for each perspective P, each unit of C1 having this perspective is linked to the unit of C2 having the same perspective. Therefore, in an entity of type T having N perspectives, N concrete links correspond to each structural link defined at the conceptual level.

Which allows an end user to control what and when the elements are delivered?

Interactive Multimediaallows an end user to control what and when theelements are delivered. 3. Hypermediais a structure of linked elements through which the user cannavigate.

Is any combination of text graphic art sound animation and video delivered to you by computer or other electronic means?

In the 1993 first edition of Multimedia: Making It Work, Tay Vaughan declared "Multimedia is any combination of text, graphic art, sound, animation, and video that is delivered by computer.

Who weave multimedia into meaningful tapestries?

The people who weave multimedia into meaningful tapestries are called multimedia developers.

What is the sum of what gets played back and how it is presented to the viewer on a monitor?

The sum of what gets played back and how it is presented to the viewer ona monitor is theGraphical User Interface.