Towards Cross-Media Information Spaces and Architectures

2012

Over the last decade, we have seen a tremendous increase in the number of digital media types that we deal with as part of our daily work. While the Web with its linking functionality was originally designed for organising information in the form of HTML documents containing embedded media such as images, movies and sounds, the underlying hypertext model is not flexible enough to deal with new media types. A flexible link and annotation service should not only support a growing set of digital media types, but also pay attention to emerging possibilities for linking and integrating the physical environment with digital information spaces in the form of augmented reality environments. The successful implementation of these so-called cross-media information spaces, where different types of digital information get linked and integrated with physical entities, demands for a rethinking of models and architectures for extensible and scalable cross-media annotation and linking. In this paper, we present our general model for open cross-media annotation and link services and highlight how this model enabled the realisation of an extensible cross-media architecture. We further introduce the concept of open cross-media information spaces where the integration of new media types on the data level as well as on the visualisation level is supported via a resource plug-in mechanism.

1991

This thesis describes a new, large-scale Hypermedia project (\Hyper-G") currently being developed at the Institute for Foundations of Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media (Head: Professor Hermann Maurer) of the Technical University of Graz. Experience gathered from modern Hypermedia systems, large-scale information systems, computer aided instruction and user interface design considerations led to a number of ideas, features, and examples of applications of Hyper-G. They were condensed, put into a logical relationship, and used to formulate a set of requirements. The requirements, additional design decisions, and a discussion of implementation-related issues are part of this thesis. Also, a new concept for the creation of real-time, interactive animation is presented. It is essentially a combination of Computer Animation and Hypermedia technologies, therefore it is called \Hyper-Animation". This concept is also the basis of some of the more advanced applications of Hyper-G that are described in this thesis. Applications range from information systems and electronic publishing to exhibits that may be found in a virtual museum or exhibition environment.

2018

Documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. However, due to a multitude of proprietary document formats with rather simple link models, today's possibilities for creating hyper-links between snippets of information in different document formats are limited. In previous work, we have presented a dynamically extensible cross-document link service overcoming the limitations of the simple link models supported by most existing document formats. Based on a plug-in mechanism, our link service enables the linking across different document types. In this paper, we assess the extensibility of our link service by integrating some document formats as well as third-party document viewers. We illustrate the flexibility of creating advanced hyperlinks across these document formats and viewers that cannot be realised with existing linking solutions or link models of existing document formats. A user study further investigates the user experience when creating and navigating cross-document hyperlinks.

1997

Abstract The paper presents a framework for link management within hyper-media documents. The framework includes:(1) an object-oriented document architecture with a consistent interface for different media types;(2) a transition model between multimedia objects founded on content-based static links for a temporal media, and content/time-based dynamic links for temporal media; and (3) intrinsic support for content-based access which requires a reduced amount of indexing.

"While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last twenty years, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. Despite predictions of the paperless office, paper is ever more present in our daily work as reflected by the continuously increasing worldwide paper consumption. Many researchers have argued for the retention of paper as an information resource and its integration into cross-media environments as opposed to its replacement. This has resulted in a wide variety of projects and technological developments for digitally augmented paper documents over the past decade. However, the majority of the realised projects focus on technical advances in terms of hardware but pay less attention to the very fundamental information integration and cross-media information management issues. Our information-centric approach for a tight integration of paper and digital information is based on extending an object-oriented database management system with functionality for cross-media information management. The resulting iServer platform introduces fundamental link concepts at an abstract level. The iServer’s core link management functionality is available across different multimedia resources. Only the media-specific portion of these general concepts, for example the specification of a link’s source anchor, has to be implemented in the form of a plug-in to support new resource types. This resource plug-in mechanism results in a flexible and extensible system where new types of digital as well as physical resources can easily be integrated and, more importantly, cross-linked to the growing set of supported multimedia resources. In addition to the associative linking of information, our solution allows for the integration of semantic metadata and supports multiple classification of information units. iServer can, not only link between various static information entities, but also link to active content and this has proven to be very effective in enabling more complex interaction design. As part of the European project Paper++, under the Disappearing Computer Programme, an iServer plug-in for interactive paper has been implemented to fully integrate paper and digital media, thereby gaining the best of the physical and the digital worlds. It not only supports linking from physical paper to digital information, but also enables links from digital content to physical paper or even paper to paper links. This multi-mode user interface results in highly interactive systems where users can easily switch back and forth between paper and digital information. The definition of an abstract input device interface further provides flexibility for supporting emerging technologies for paper link definition in addition to the hardware solutions for paper link definition and activation that were developed within the Paper++ project. We introduce different approaches for cross-media information authoring where information is either compiled by established publishers with an expertise in a specific domain or by individuals who produce their own cross-media information environments. Preauthored information can be combined with personally aggregated information. A distributed peer-to-peer version of the iServer platform supports collaborative authoring and the sharing of link knowledge within a community of users. The associations between different types of resources as well as other application-specific information can be visualised on different output channels. Universal access to the iServer’s information space is granted using the eXtensible Information Management Architecture (XIMA), our publishing platform for multi-channel access. Our fundamental concepts for interactive paper and cross-media information management have been designed independently of particular hardware solutions and modes of interaction which enables the iServer platform to easily adapt to both new technologies and applications. Finally, the information infrastructure that we have developed has great potential as an experimental platform for the investigation of emerging multimedia resources in general and interactive paper with its possible applications in particular."

2008

We present a framework that supports the development of pervasive cross-media applications through a clean separation of interaction design and application programming. The approach is based on a novel concept of active components that provides a lightweight mechanism for linking physical and digital entities to services. We show how the development of cross-media applications can be simplified by adopting an authoring rather than a programming approach and how we achieved this by integrating the active component concept into an extensible hypermedia server.

2018

Physical and digital documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked. Previous research in Human-Computer Interaction and Personal Information Management has revealed certain user behaviour in associating information across physical and digital documents. Nevertheless , there is a lack of empirical studies on user needs and behaviour when defining these associations. In this paper, we address this lack of empirical studies and provide insights into strategies that users apply when associating information across physical and digital documents. In addition, our study reveals the limitations of current practices and we suggest improvements for associating information across documents. Last but not least, we identify a set of design implications for the development of future cross-document linking solutions.

2013

Cross-device application development poses different requirements ranging from the adaptation and distribution of user interfaces, over the migration of application state to the management of data as it is moved around and shared between devices. In particular, the evaluation of multi-device user interfaces becomes a challenge when they are distributed across a range of interaction resources. We present our ongoing work towards a platform for the design and evaluation of cross-device applications that promotes the central concept of a cross-device session useful for both design and evaluation. Our concept enables the tracking and management of the data part of a distributed, multi-device application as it is viewed and updated on different devices as well as the metadata describing the interactions and how the data evolved as a result of them. We illustrate the benefits of our approach for a first cross-device application and discuss how we plan to address the remaining challenges.

2007

Context-aware consumption of content implies that platforms mediating the access to content must be able to do that independently of the user location, type of terminal, network conditions and content formats. In addition, user preferences, environmental conditions and content owners and usage rights should be respected. The fulfillment of this concept requires the availability of a comprehensive set of metadata related with both the content and the usage environment. But how can systems coherently and easily exchange, inter-relate and use the different types of required meta– information? This paper presents the solution developed within the ENTHRONE project with this aim, describing the mechanisms designed for publishing multimedia content and all relevant metadata associated with the consumption of that content, in an open and unified form, for accessing that content upon request of end-users and decide if and what kind of adaptation operations are needed to provide a context-awa...

18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2007), 2007

In this paper we present the rationale and the main components for a modular and extensible architecture for building and deploying physical hypermedia software. We show that this kind of software systems poses strong requirements on supporting software (such as Web browsers) because they involve complex context-aware navigation semantics. By using some simple archetypical examples we also show how to provide context-aware assistance to the mobile user, as he explores the physical world.