The evolving role of software engineering in the production of multimedia applications

The traditional approach to software engineering is based on the waterfall model or some variation of this model. It is well known, however, that this approach is not particularly well suited to the production of one-of-a-kind or experimental systems due to fuzzy user requirements-users are not sure what can be accomplished. Since most multimedia applications are currently of this type, we must search for alternative approaches. One such alternative is based on rapid prototyping in which we quickly generate a working system that we use to validate user requirements. For distributed multimedia applications, we have experimented with a prototyping environment based on grammar formalisms and utilizing Web technologies such as HTML/XML to generate a working prototype. Such an approach seems to be promising and we are currently pursuing this line of research. For the future, researchers working at the interface of software engineering and multimedia systems may identify high-level abstractions common to such applications which will permit the traditional approach to software engineering, backed up with appropriate CASE tools, to be used