Model Driven Development of Multimedia Applications

The development of multimedia applications is a branch of software development of increasing importance. Many advanced user interfaces integrate multimedia elements, and critical multimedia systems are emerging, e.g. in training and simulation areas. Multimedia user interfaces pose a number of new challenges to the software development process and technologies. Unfortunately, software engineering principles are mostly ignored in current practice of multimedia application development. This paper suggests a way of how the gap between multimedia applications and software engineering can be made smaller. A modeling language is presented which is based on UML 2.0, but is tailored for effective, platform-independent abstractions from concrete multimedia technologies. Using such a modeling language, we show it is possible to apply the paradigm of Model-Driven Development to multimedia applications, leading to better structured and more maintainable applications, and a much higher degree of independence from multimedia platform technologies. The language is described using a medium-sized case study, and concepts for prototypical tools supporting model-driven development of multimedia applications are outlined.