Composing Multimedia Artefacts for Reuse

This paper describes a pattern language that is used to define a multimedia authoring environment capable of producing and utilising multimedia components. We believe that the effective construction of multimedia material should refrain from the common practice of building new documents and presentations entirely from scratch. Hence, the proposed pattern language emphasises the process of making new multimedia artefacts by reusing the existing components to suit the requirements of new applications. Each of the presented patterns describes one well-known approach to multimedia authoring, e.g. joining and breaking artefact groups, defining and filling in templates, arranging and re-arranging artefact collections, creating and holding presentations, synchronising multiple multimedia channels, etc. The paper also provides some insight as to the direction of the pattern language development, i.e. it lists six dimensions of multimedia authoring and reuse and shows what areas of functionality the final form of the pattern language must ultimately address.