There has been many efforts in the research community to create reusable learning objects with rich metadata specification. Even with this effort, there is still a gap in the document representation of learning objects and its contents semantics. This gap makes difficult to create individual plans made to explore the learning curve and necessities of each student when consuming digital learning objects. In this paper we present a novel approach based on the hyperknowledge conceptual model to improve the understanding, reasoning and visualization of the professors about the learning process of his or her students. This approach helps professors to make queries that identify student behaviors over time. It also allows recommendation systems to be developed exploiting good user practices and past behavior patterns to suggest better ways for students to browse educational content.

This paper describes the BumbAR approach for composing multimedia presentations and evaluates it through a qualitative study based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The BumbAR proposal is based on the event-condition-action model of Nested Context Model (NCM) and explores the use of augmented reality and real-world objects (markers) as an innovative user interface to specify the behavior and relationships between the media objects in a presentation. The qualitative study aimed at measuring the users' attitude towards using BumbAR and an augmented reality environment for authoring multimedia presentations. The results show that the participants found the BumbAR approach both useful and easy-to-use, while most of them (66,67%) found the system more convenient than traditional desktop-based authoring tools.

Nowadays, tablets and smartphones are commonly used by children for both entertainment and education purposes. In special, interactive multimedia eBooks running on those devices allow a richer experience when compared to traditional text-only books, being potentially more engaging and entertaining to readers. However, to explore the most exciting features in these environments, authors are currently left alone in the sense that there is no high level (less technical) support, and these features are usually accessible only through programming or some other technical skill. In this work, we aim at extracting the main features on enhanced children's eBooks and propose a model, named Fábulas - the Portuguese word for fables -that allows authors to create interactive multimedia children's eBooks declaratively. The model was conceived by taking, as a starting point, a systematic analysis of the common concepts, with the focus on identifying and categorizing recurring characteristics and pointing out functional and non-functional requirements that establish a strong orientation towards the set of desirable abstractions of an underlying model. Moreover, the paper presents a case study for the implementation of Fábulas on the Web, and discusses the authoring of a complete interactive story over it.

Templates have been used to engage non-expert multimedia authors as content producers. In template-based authoring, templates with most of the relevant application logic and application constraints are developed by experts, who must also specify the template semantics, report which are the required gaps to be filled in, and how to do so. Filling template's gaps is the single task left to inexperienced users to produce the final applications. To do that, they usually must understand the padding instructions reported by template authors and learn some specific padding language. An alternative is using specific GUI components created specifically to each new developed template. This paper proposes a semi-automatic generation of GUI Wizards to guide end(-user) authors to create multimedia applications. The wizard can be tuned to improve the communication between the template author and the template end user, and also if the template specification is not complete. Many successful trial cases show that the generated wizards are usually simple enough to be used by non-experts. The contributions coming from this paper is not constrained to any specific template language or final-application format. Nevertheless, aiming at testing the proposal it was instantiated to work with TAL (Template Authoring Language) whose template processors can generate applications in different target languages.

TAL (Template Authoring Language) is a specification language for hypermedia document templates. Templates describe application families with structural and semantic similarities. In TAL, templates not only define design patterns that applications must follow, but also constraints on the use of these patterns. A template must be processed together with a padding document giving rise to a new document in some specification language, called target language. TAL supports the description of templates independently of the languages used to specify target and padding documents. Usually a specific processor is required for each target language and for each padding document used. This paper concerns TAL processors. However, we should note that the proposal can be easily extended to any other solution used to define templates. Any pattern language and any language used to define constraints could be used instead of TAL. The TAL processor architecture is general and it is discussed when presenting the processor framework. As an instantiation example, an implementation of a TAL Processor targeting NCL (the declarative language of Ginga DTV middleware) is examined, and also another one targeting HTML-based middleware. The use of wizards for defining padding documents is also discussed in the examples of the proposed architecture instantiation.

This paper deals with the generation of dynamic hypermedia applications whose content and behavior their authors may not be able to predict a priori, but which must conform to a strict set of explicitly defined constraints. In the paper, we show that it is possible to establish an architecture configuration to be followed by this special kind of dynamic applications. In the proposed architecture, templates are responsible for specifying the design patterns and the constraints to be followed. Some alternatives for distributing (from the client side to the server side) the components that comprise the architecture are discussed, and one of them is used to exemplify an instantiation of the architecture. In the instantiation, TAL (Template Authoring Language) is used to define templates. In TAL, templates are open-compositions, that is, especial set of patterns for compositions, whose content must obey some explicitly defined constraints. The paper also shows how the architecture instantiation could be used to build dynamic digital TV applications.

Textual programming languages have proven to be difficult to learn and to use effectively for many people. For this sake, visual tools can be useful to abstract the complexity of such textual languages, minimizing the specification efforts. In this paper we present a visual approach for high level specification of spatiotemporal relations. In order to accomplish this task, our visual representation provides an intuitive way to specify complex synchronization events amongst media. Finally, to validate our work, the visual specification is mapped to NCL (Nested Context Language), the standard declarative language of the Brazilian Terrestrial Digital TV System.

The increasing number of multimedia applications has motivated the construction of platforms with end-to-end quality of service (QoS) support. This work proposes the use of Wright architecture description language (ADL) in the QoS provisioning domain, as the basis for the formal verification of QoS system properties. To smooth this task, the LindaQoS domain-specific language was designed as a high-level notation for the specification of resource (QoS) orchestration. As a result of this approach, we expect that designers can define clear and unambiguous instantiated platforms, with support to multimedia application implementations, in a reduced development time.