Using SIVA XML and SMIL for Interactive Non-linear Videos: a Comparison

With recent technologies, it is possible to create appealing multimedia presentations or extended videos with a high level of interactivity. Standards like SMIL provide extensive structures to describe metadata for timing and spacing of single media elements which then form a presentation. While multimedia presentations are viewed mainly in a linear manner, provide interactive and non-linear videos a much higher level of interactivity and navigational possibilities. In this work, we examine the usability of SMIL to describe temporal and spatial relationships of videos and annotations, as well as interaction and navigational elements. We therefore compared SMIL with the SIVA XML. We tried to find ways to express SIVA XML structures with SMIL attributes and elements. After that, we compared the DTD/XSD of SMIL and SIVA XML using XML metrics.