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MAVA Multimedia Suite - About |
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| The Mava Multimedia Suite can be used to create interactive multimedia presentations. Key goal of the suite is to provide a simple, graphical and interactive creation of multimedia presentations (screenshot 1) for different application areas, like computer-based trainings, slide-based presentations or tourist guides. The suite provides an innovative concept, called dynamic extensibility of multimedia systems, to support authoring of presentations in different application areas without programming knowledge. Screenshot 2 shows the application area "interactive tourist guide". In this demonstration the user "interacts with the document" by changing his current position. You can view this document as an applet.
The Mava Multimedia Suite uses a so-called operator-based approach, what means than an author specifies relations between media items with operators. An application concept provides a set of operators for a particular application area. During authoring the main tasks are to specify these relationships by connecting operators to media items and to define properties of media items and operators. The documentation provides more details on this. This simple concept combined with the extensibility is the major strength of the MAVA Multimedia Suite. Both, the presentation system and the authoring system are dynamically extensible during runtime, what means that new media types and application concepts can be added.
In the current development stage it is already possible to create complex interactive multimedia presentations. In the future it is intended to add more application concepts and to further improve the authoring process. During implementation of the MAVA Multimedia Suite, open standards like XML (Extensible Markup Language) and Java have been used. This enables a complete Internet integration, i.e. both applications are plattform independent and runnable via web browser. Besides the authoring concept, the platform-independence is the second major strength of the MAVA Multimedia Suite. So far it is tested on three different plattforms, namely Linux, Windows and Sun Solaris. The same document can be authored and presented without any change on all platforms. The Mava Multimedia Suite was initially created during my time as scientific research staff member of the Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems of the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Concepts and ideas were published and presented on national und international conferences during four years. |
