Modeling advanced concepts of interactive multimedia applications

The initial vision associated with multimedia is to achieve user interfaces (UI) which are highly interactive, intelligent, usable, and entertaining. Although early multimedia applications did not always fulfill these expectations, today´s applications come much closer towards this vision. Examples are Rich Internet Applications like Google Maps, Edutainment Systems, or new UIs in the context of Ubiquitous Computing. The key difference is the increased dynamics of the UI (media objects are created/modified depending to the current context) and the tighter integration of UI elements with the application logic. Although this dynamism allows new forms of applications, it is problematic when engineering such applications: Existing multimedia modeling approaches focus mainly on the spatio-temporal integration of media objects. However, they hardly allow modeling the integration with the application logic or generic media objects. Hence, many of these concepts cannot be handled. To address these challenges, this paper first illustrates the problem with examples from common applications. Subsequently, we propose a solution how to integrate these concepts into a consistent modeling language. The discussed issues can be generalized from the presented language and integrated into other approaches, e.g., modeling languages for Rich Internet Applications.