Control and data abstraction approach for multimedia presentation

The demonstration of multimedia presentation can be promoted by using multi-vendor's tools. The more tools are used, the more complicated the communication needed among these tools. Thus, how to effectively integrate these tools becomes critical in a multimedia environment. This paper describes an architecture named Tool Integration Platform (TIP) to integrate tools in a knowledge abstraction way. TIP is composed of a CID (Control Integration Daemon) a CII (Control Integration Interface) and some Integration Inference Rules (IIR) that are applied by the Integration Inference Engine (IIE). The IIR are stored in a Repository and used to deduce tool knowledge dynamically. In this way, the tool knowledge can be used as the control function constrains to identify the relation of tools. Therefore, TIP can be a cooperative multimedia presentation developing environment. To verify this architecture MS/Windows is selected as a test suite, thus proving that TIP is portable to another environment. For the explanation of tool integration, tools such as a Resource Editor, a Resource Browser, and a Presentation Designer are integrated as the example into TIP. Finally, a number of compared items are proposed to assess TIP with other environments and standards. An evaluated method is also proposed to be the metrics to discuss the tool integration status.