Dividable dynamic timeline-based authoring for SMI 2.0 presentations

Timeline-based editing provides users an intuitive and friendly way of multimedia authoring, but the schedule-based and deterministic property of the timeline results in a lack of ability to support non-deterministic temporal behavior, which is one of the key features of SMIL2.0. This paper presents the efforts to support non-deterministic temporal behavior by timeline-based editing. The concept of dividable dynamic timeline (DDT) is proposed in the paper, which includes two novel features: dividable timeline and dynamic section. With DDTL, authors can create interactive multimedia presentations while enjoying the convenience of the timeline. Mechanisms for converting from DDTL editing results to SMTL2.0 are also presented in the paper