Formal Specification and Prototyping of Multimedia Applications

Multimedia systems incorporating hyperlinks and user interaction can be prototyped using TAOML, an extension of HTML. TAOML is used to define a Teleaction Object (TAO) which is a multimedia object with associated hypergraph structure and knowledge structure. The user can create and modify the private knowledge of a TAO so that the TAO will react automatically to certain events. The hypergraph structure supports the effective presentation and efficient communication of multimedia information. TAOs are valuable since they greatly improve the selective access and presentation of relevant multimedia information. In this paper, a formal specification methodology for TAOs using SR grammars is described. An attributed SR grammar is then introduced in order to associate knowledge with the TAO. The limitations necessary to achieve an efficient parser are given. The grammatical formalism allows for validation and verification of the system specification. This methodology thus provides a principled approach to specify, verify, validate and prototype multimedia applications.