A prototypic presentation engine for MCF

This thesis describes a prototypic implementation of a presentation system for the multimedia design tool Media Construction Formalism (MCF). The prototypic system has two main components, a textual XML-based representation of the visual constructs of MCF, known as MCFML, together with a translator which is capable of translating the MCFML into SMIL plus Jscript code. The SMIL plus Jscript code produced is exported to an external SMIL player, Internet Explorer (IE) for rendering. Current XML technologies and publicly available XML processing tools were used to implement the prototypic presentation system. The problem of mapping the MCF visual constructs to the XML description was addressed by expressing the generic constructs of the MCF language as XML schema definition; the result is referred to as MCF-XML schema. This MCF-XML schema provided the structure and syntax to author MCFML documents. In this thesis the similarity in the expressive power of the visual formalism to that of the MCF-XML schema definition has been illustrated by authoring various multimedia artifacts (MCF author's version of the animation game (ballgame) and Interactive multimedia presentation) in MCFML. The major contribution of this work is the development of the generic XSLT style sheet which carries out the transformation of MCFML documents to SMIL plus Jscript code. The Microsofts .Net framework was used for implementing the style sheets as well as the XSLT processor. As far as I am aware with an extensive literature review, this work is first to generate realistic SMIL-based rendering for a multimedia design tool. This signifies that no design tools (which have their rendering engines in their prototypic form) have prototyped their designs as realistically as achieved through my work. However, this realistic rendering of the MCF designs was achieved at the expense of the genericity of the MCF system. Although not strictly part of the work I have designed a solution strategy wherein I propose to link my prototypic system with the MCF editor. From my experience in developing SMIL-based presentation engine for the design system MCF I was able to provide a constructive feedback about the constructs of MCF (in particular Object Oriented paradigm of the MCF model) in terms of representation in MCFML and translating them into SMIL and scripting languages. A brief overview of my feedback is that the genericity of the MCF model is lost as a result of mapping the visual MCF formalism to descriptive XML format (MCFML) and translating to SMIL descriptive format. In this thesis I have proved to the designers of the MCF system that by extending few constructs of MCF formalism one can author designs and prototype interactive multimedia presentations.