Sha Xin Wei Stanford Universitymmdd: an open meta-testbed for multimedia distributed documents
February 11, 1994
We describe a multimedia distributed documents system (mmdd)
which manages associations of arbitrary renderable objects (text,
graphics, sound, video, applications) using a hybrid object-oriented,
relational database abstraction. It features author-modifiable
schema, author-reconfigurable front ends, and extensibility to
arbitrary media types and search methods. The mmdd was designed
around the projected needs of faculty and their assistant authors,
based on extensive experience with authoring multimedia simulations.
The mmdd attempts to enable authoring and navigation across
environments supporting sophisticated user interface models,
and does not address low-level issues such as synchronization
of time-based media, or algebras of virtual media devices.
A key characteristic of the mmdd is that its atoms are not
traditional documents but abstract entities. We have architected
the mmdd as an open testbed in which researchers are welcome
to test intelligent multimodal navigation methods and metaphors
on everyday users of real corpora.
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Sha Xin Wei is a staff member of the Academic Software Development
group at Stanford. He studied mathematics at Harvard and Stanford,
concentrating in differential geometry and variational problems
associated with total curvature. He was swept into computers
with the introduction of the Macintosh and the joint Apple-Stanford
Faculty Authoring Project in 1984, an experiment to discover
non-traditional ways of using computers in research and learning.
He served as a programmer and project leader for Blas Cabrera's
Physics Simulations.
One general will-o'-the-wisp pursued by Xin Wei and his colleagues
in later incarnations of the FAD group was environments which
could support multiple modes of analysis, simulation and communication
as "transparently" as paper or chalkboard, encapsulated
by the expression "intelligent blackboards." His work
includes projects such as an object-oriented scientific simulation
kit, an American Sign Language interactive videodisc, a Chinese
course using QuickTime & WorldScript, several series of symbolic
algebra + graphics notebooks for differential equations, complex
analysis, elementary differential geometry, as well as a smattering
of applications in fields such as virtual theater, epidemiology,
demography and quantum inflationary cosmology (for Andre Linde).
Most recently he's been engaged with the problem of seeking,
browsing, describing, and re-authoring digital material under
multiple, flexible (author-reshapeable) interfaces.
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