On the Knowledge Underlying Multimedia Presentations

Abstract : We address one of the problems at the heart of automated multimedia presentation production and interpretation. The media problem can be stated as follows: how does the producer of a presentation determine which information to allocate to which medium, and how does a perceiver recognize the function of each part as displayed in the presentation and integrate them into a coherent whole? What knowledge is used, and what processes? We describe the four major types of knowledge that play a role in the allocation problem as well as interdependencies that hold among them. We discuss two formalisms that can be usedto represent this knowledge and, using examples, describe the kinds of processing required for the media allocation problem. Multimedia presentations, Human-computer interaction, Presentation planning.