ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24 are developing a standard for the presentation of multimedia objects, called PREMO (Presentation Environments for Multimedia Objects). PREMO is aimed at application developers who want to include multimedia effects into the applications, but do not want to restrict themselves to model of multimedia documents, which is prevalent in multimedia applications today. This report gives an overview of the current status of PREMO. AMS Subject Classification (1991): 68N15 CR Subject Classification (1991): D.1.5, D.2.0, D.2.6, H.5.1, I.3.2, I.3.6, K.1 Keywords and Phrases: PREMO, multimedia, object models, active objects, standards Note: This paper will be published in the IEEE Multimedia journal 1. Introduction Multimedia is a booming industry; this statement has become commonplace these days. There are a growing number of multimedia tools and multimedia environments available on all major computing platforms, and multimedia products have begun to appear in the end co...

Of the various programming paradigms in use today, object-orientation is probably the most successful in terms of industrial take-up and application, particularly in the field of multimedia. It is therefore unsurprising that this technology has been adopted by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24 as the foundation for a forthcoming International Standard for Multimedia, called PREMO. Two important design aims of PREMO are that it be distributable, and that it provide a set of media-related services that can be extended in a disciplined way to support the needs of future applications and problem domains. While key aspects of the object-oriented paradigm provide a sound technical basis for achieving these aims, the need to balance extensibility and a high-level programming interface against the realities of efficiency and ease of implementation in a distributed setting meant that the task of synthesising a Standard from existing practice was non-trivial. Indeed, in order to meet the design aims of...

. This paper presents an Active Objects Model (AOM) as an environment for the implementation and demonstration of learning concepts using fuzzy logics and fuzzy knowledge. Distributed fuzzy knowledge is used by model agents in cooperative learning and as well in behaviour execution. The AOM model consists of a set of active agents with private rule based behaviours. One important facility is the description of trajectory based behaviour by a direct manipulation technique. A consistent set of actions and fuzzy rules for both supervised and unsupervised learning is investigated. 1 Introduction In interactive applications such as visual programming, courseware authoring [11, 12], dynamic simulation, multimedia [3, 4, 13, 14, and 16], or rapid prototyping [1, 17], application developers need to define by direct manipulation both the structure of the model and its evolution. This paper attempts to estimate the convenience of fuzzy logics, multi-agent systems, the notion of trajectory, and ...

this document include the placement of information (involving the allocation of screen space and audio channels) and the relative ordering of information. Concretely, if both of the headline streams are allocated the same space on the screen, then only one stream should be selected for display. (The one selected would depend on the user or the document.) Alternatively, the two formatted text streams containing English and Dutch captions could be defined to allow both to be displayed at the same time if a user wished to do so. Note that if these captions have a content-based relationship to the video and/or audio streams, the relative presentation time of each stream also becomes important.

This paper presents an Active Objects Model as an environment for the implementation and demonstration of key concepts in the emerging ISO/IEC Standard, PResentation Environments for Multimedia Objects (PREMO). The event-based synchronization mechanism which is a key concept in multimedia presentation is presented through a set of examples. The AOM model consists of a set of active agents with distributed rule based behaviours. One important facility is the description of trajectory based behaviour in direct manipulation technique. Key words: PREMO, multimedia presentation, agents, active objects, rule based behaviour, trajectory, event based synchronization. 1. Introduction The Active Object Model (AOM) has been developed at the University of Cluj-Napoca as a possible framework for the development of complex multimedia applications, visual programming environments, intelligent graphical user interfaces [8, 9], virtual reality, and courseware authoring [5, 6, 10, 11, 12]. An implemen...

. The Active Objects Model (AOM) as a model-based user interface development environment is presented. The paper highlights the convenience of the trajectory notion in the description of the structure and functionality of graphical user interfaces. The AOM model consists of a set of active agents with private rule based behaviours. Model entities involve topological information which define, through a direct manipulation technique, the active object behaviour definition, parallel and cooperative evolution of agents, time controlling, event oriented or supervised behaviour, interactive techniques, visual programming constructs, rapid prototyping, and demonstration based interfaces. 1 Introduction Over the last year development of user interface construction tools has emphasized a set of concepts, methodologies and techniques which support the design of interfaces with good performance. These user interface construction tools have to support applications from new domains such as: distri...

The MADE constraint system provides excellent opportunities to introduce constraints in a multimedia application. Multimedia applications are not only a good place to experiment with constraint systems; constraints in a multimedia environment are almost indispensable. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the number of relations between several parts of this data, multimedia applications almost demand the support of a constraint management system. The MADE constraint system combines the object oriented programming paradigm, inherited from the mC++ language, the declarative constraint programming paradigm and the special requirements imposed upon the constraint system by the multimedia environment. Among other things, the MADE constraint system provides parallel satisfaction techniques; several constraints may be solved simultaneously and this satisfaction process is performed in parallel with the application.This not only reduces the time needed to solve the constraints, it also a...

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24 are developing a standard for the presentation of multimedia objects, called Premo (Presentation Environments for Multimedia Objects). Premo is a multipart standard, the most well-defined parts of which, at the time of writing, are at the stage of Committee Draft. This paper describes how formal description techniques are being used in the development of the Premo standard, shadowing the development of the standard itself. The approach taken uses a combination of Z and Object-Z. The motivation and merits of this approach are discussed, and illustrated with a description of some fundamental concepts of the Premo object model. AMS Subject Classification (1991): 68N15 CR Subject Classification (1991): D.1.5,D.2.1,D.3.1,F.3.2,H.5.1,I.m,K.1 Keywords & Phrases: PREMO, formal methods, multimedia, object models, active objects, Z, Object-Z. Note: This paper has been offered for publication in the journal "Computer Standards and Interfaces". 1. Introduction Premo -...

Advances in hardware, software, and coding standards for digital media have now made the delivery of multimedia information a standard component of many systems. Unfortunately, the pace of this technological development, coupled with strong commercial competition between leading vendors, has meant that little consensus has emerged over the design of programming interfaces to allow the creation, manipulation and presentation of such data. PREMO (PResentation Environments for Multimedia Objects) is a project within the SC24 committee of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) aimed at developing an API (Application Programmer Interface) for distributed multimedia. This work goes beyond previous SC24 standards such as GKS and PHIGS in combining both synthesised graphics with general digital media. This paper describes the contents of the PREMO standard and explains how the integration of graphics into a general framework for media processing is achieved. Keywords: Distributed multimedia, Standards, PREMO. 1