Premo: an emerging standard for multimedia presentation. I. Overview and framework

Developers needing to realize high-level multimedia applications are essentially left on their own. Only a few programming tools allow the creation of multimedia effects based on a more general model than multimedia documents. No currently available ISO standard encompasses these needs. A standard in this area should focus more on the presentation aspects of multimedia and less on the coding, transfer, or hypermedia document aspects, which are covered other standards. It should also concentrate on programming tools rather than multimedia document format. These are exactly the main concerns of the Premo (Presentation Environment for Multimedia Objects) standard, the subject of the article. Premo´s major features can be briefly summarized as follows: Premo is a presentation environment that aims to provide a standard programming environment in a very general sense, one that helps promote portable multimedia applications; Premo targets multimedia presentation, whereas earlier SC24 standards concentrated either on synthetic graphics or image-processing systems; Premo is object oriented. This means that, through standard object-oriented techniques, a Premo implementation becomes extensible and configurable. Object-oriented technology also provides a framework to describe distribution in a consistent manner