Socially-Aware Multimedia Authoring: past, present, and future

Creating compelling multimedia productions is a nontrivial task. This is as true for creating professional content as it is for nonprofessional editors. During the past 20 years, authoring networked content has been a part of the research agenda of the multimedia community. Unfortunately, authoring has been seen as an initial enterprise that occurs before ‘real’ content processing takes place. This limits the options open to authors and to viewers of rich multimedia content for creating and receiving focused, highly personal media presentations. This article reflects on the history of multimedia authoring. We focus on the particular task of supporting socially-aware multimedia, in which the relationships within particular social groups among authors and viewers can be exploited to create highly personal media experiences. We provide an overview of the requirements and characteristics of socially-aware multimedia authoring within the context of exploiting community content. We continue with a short historical perspective on authoring support for these types of situations. We then present an overview of a current system for supporting socially-aware multimedia authoring within the community content. We conclude with a discussion of the issues that we feel can provide a fruitful basis for future multimedia authoring support. We argue that providing support for socially-aware multimedia authoring can have a profound impact on the nature and architecture of the entire multimedia information processing pipeline.