TOCPN: Interactive Temporal Model for Interactive Multimedia Documents

Recently, much attention has been paid to interactive temporal models which let authors deene possible interactions with users and represent dynamic organization of hypermedia documents. The possibility of user interaction makes it very hard for authors to predict the course of presentation and to author a document without an authoring tool. The authoring tool then must be designed with a rich model representing the dynamic temporal structure of interactive multime-dia documents. This temporal structure model should be able to specify the temporal composition of interactive documents and synchronization. We investigate possible interactions of users and design a new interactive temporal structure model based on the time interval model called Transitional Object Composition Petri Net (TOCPN). The novel features of TOCPN include capability of expressing dynamic structure of interactive multimedia document, providing a synchronization mechanism for various media with various temporal relations, supporting sharing and reusing of existing objects, and supporting composite objects as well as atomic objects. In this paper, we also deene requirements of the authoring tool and helper tools, and provide a preliminary architecture of the authoring tool.