Automating the organization of presentations for playout management in multimedia databases

We introduce a constraint-driven methodology for the automated assembly, organization and playout of presentations from multimedia databases. We use inclusion and exclusion constraints for extracting a semantically coherent set of multimedia segments. Presentation organization constraints are utilized for organizing the multimedia segments into a presentation, which in turn helps decide the playout order of the extracted multimedia segments. The playout order of the segments is represented in a presentation graph. If the specified set of organization constraints are not sufficient to construct a unique presentation graph, we propose two techniques so that a unique graph is constructible. We also propose playout algorithms, one for the generation, start and termination of playout agents, the other to provide dynamic controls for playout management of organized presentations. The characteristics of these algorithms are expressed in terms of presentation playout parameters.