SampLe: towards a framework for system-supported multimedia authoring

Much current research on hypermedia generation accepts user input only at the start of an otherwise fully-automated process. However, since multimedia presentation creation is often a complex and creative process, it has multiple phases which would each benefit from human intervention. This paper presents a hypermedia generation model that lets the user influence all phases of this computer-assisted human-guided process. The main focus is on providing extra support for helping the user find relevant media items and combine them meaningfully into a rich and coherent multimedia presentation. Like fully-automated systems, our approach uses explicit knowledge about the presentation's topic domain, narrative structures, hypermedia presentation and distinctions between media modalities. This paper presents a motivating scenario that is used to derive a number of system requirements and to discuss the pros and cons of the presented approach.