Multimedia presentation organization and playout management using intelligent agents

This paper presents a model for organization, computation and management of automated multimedia presentations based on active multimedia segments retrieved from a multimedia information system as well as the Web. Existing multimedia presentation system is extended in such a way that its content selection component spans from local data resources to the entire Web by use of intelligent agents which associates related multimedia segments. We describe a multimedia presentation authoring environment in which a new heuristic method is introduced based on the multimedia resources selected and organization operators to apply. This method is used for the construction of a presentation graph representing an organized presentation. Once the presentation graph is constructed, we show how to obtain an event-point representation of the presentation graph. Based on event-point representation, three methods are given for playing out the constructed presentations at the presentation terminal. Presentation environments of the end-users are modeled as (i) without any constraint, (ii) with a single constraint, and (iii) with multiple constraints (one constraint for each type of multimedia segments in the organized presentation). In accordance with these limitations (i.e., without violating any of the end-user specified constraints), three methods play out any organized presentation.