Automatic Temporal Formatting of Multimedia Presentations Using Dynamic Petri Nets

An efficient authoring tool would provide support for automatic temporal formatting and modeling of multimedia presentations. Automatic temporal formatting is a process of converting the given presentation specifications into a required temporal format. This paper presents an algorithm that can convert a temporal layout into a dynamic petri net (DPN) which can represent iterative and interactive presentation components effectively. The prototype of the authoring tool extracts the temporal layout from any given SMIL file representation and uses the proposed algorithm to automatically convert it into a DPN. The DPN generated automatically at compile-time helps the run-time components in effectively playing out the presentation and it can also be used to verify the presentation specifications for several properties.