Designing Consistent Multimedia Documents: The RT-LOTOS Methodology

• Published in: Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems pp. 290 - 303
• Main Authors: Sampaio, Paulo Nazareno Maia, Rodríguez Peralta, Laura Margarita, Courtiat, Jean-Pierre
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Formal Methodology; Media Object; Multimedia Document; Passive Action; Reachability Graph
• ISBN: 9783540754534; 3540754539
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-75454-1_21

Interactive Multimedia Documents (IMDs) are expected to satisfy temporal consistency properties in order to ensure that their synchronization constraints (temporal, logical and causal) can be respected during their presentation. If an inconsistent situation can not be detected previously, the presentation of the document can be lead to undesirable deadlocks (global or partial). In particular, the flexibility of high level authoring models (such as SMIL 2.0) for the edition of complex IMDs can lead authors, in certain cases, to specify inconsistent documents. For this reason, it is necessary to apply a methodology that provides the formal modelling for the dynamic behavior of the document, consistency checking, and the scheduling of the presentation taking into account the temporal non-determinism of these documents. This paper presents the main results of the development of a formal methodology which is based on the Formal Description Technique RT-LOTOS, and which has been successfully applied to support the design of complex SMIL 2.0 documents.