We address the problem of realizing communicative plans in graphics. Our approach calls for mapping communicative goals to conceptual tasks and then using task-based graphic design for selecting graphical techniques. In this paper, we present the mapping rules in several dimensions: data aggregation and selection, task synthesis, and task aggregation. Those rules have been incorporated in AutoBrief, a research system for multimedia explanation.

We claim that automatic multimedia presentation can be modeled by integrating two complementary approaches to automatic design: hierarchical planning to achieve communicative goals, and task-based graphic design. The interface between the two approaches is a domain and media independent layer of communicative goals and actions. A planning process decomposes domain-specific goals to domain-independent goals, which in turn are realized by media-specific techniques. One of these techniques is taskbased graphic design. We apply our approach to presenting information from large data sets using natural language and information graphics. Keywords Multimedia presentation, information seeking tasks, media allocation, information graphics, presentation planning. INTRODUCTION Understanding large data sets and explaining them to others via effective displays is a complex, laborious and time consuming activity. Analysts and other types of specialists on a daily and sometimes hourly basis explor...

: A framework is presented for hypermedia access to weather information originating from gridded data sets. The information is presented on different media (map, text, graph, table, image), depending on what aspect is emphasized. The user navigates by selecting an element that is already displayed, and a new product is generated that provides additional details about the selected element. The contents of a product is represented by a description, which is an organized chunk of assertions. Each assertion provides a single weather characteristic to a given region and time period. Three knowledge bases (weather, territory, and time models) define the objects participating in the assertions and drive the generation. Keywords: hypermedia, domain modeling, media modeling, assertional systems, applications 1. Introduction We are in the era of numerical weather analysis and forecasting. Advanced data sets are generated with high temporal and spatial resolution. However, these data sets canno...