Section: Software
LimSee3
Participants : Jan Mikáč, Cécile Roisin.
LimSee3 is a new generation open source multimedia authoring tool developed in the context of the european project Palette (see section 8.2.1 ). It aims at flexibility and easiness of use through extensive use of document templates. LimSee3 developments benefit from the project-team experience acquired with LimSee2, an already well-established SMIL editor.
Existing multimedia authoring tools can be classified in two broad categories:
General purpose tools make it possible to edit various kinds of multimedia documents and allow authors to precisely manipulate the underlying structures. Such tools are indeed very powerful, yet they remain exceedingly complex and require special skills and serious training to be used efficiently. LimSee2 fits in this category.
Dedicated tools are tailored for some particular domain or document type. They are easily accessible to casual users, thanks to their simplified approach to document authoring. Their main advantage lies in the simplicity and automation of some treatments, but users often find themselves trapped in a rigid framework that imposes strong limitations. In addition, authors have to use multiple tools to manipulate different types of documents.
Taking a different perspective, LimSee3 brings multimedia authoring at the reach of non-expert users while allowing very different types of documents to be produced. The main idea is to provide template-based authoring tools with rich composition capabilities and smooth adaptability. Based on the semantics of multimedia objects, LimSee3 allows authors to work in their own terms. With the integration of templates, users are guided in the production of sensible multimedia documents. Different templates allow authors to produce different types of documents.
As opposed to LimSee2, which sticks to the SMIL language , LimSee3 is language-independent. It is based on a component-oriented document model integrating homogeneously logical, spatial, and time structures in a language-neutral way. Templates are defined as constraints on these structures. Based on this logical structuring of multimedia documents, LimSee3 can generate different representations of the same document, in different languages or formats.
LimSee3 was developed as an entirely new open source project in the european project Palette (see section 8.2.1 ).
