This diploma thesis has evolved from the research project "Gallery of Cardiac Surgery" which aims at the development of a network-based database-driven repository of multimedia documents in the domain of cardiac surgery. It is required that these documents or parts of them -- called fragments -- can be flexibly composed to new individualized documents. On the one hand this composition can be performed by authors of document content. On the other hand the information system must be able to compose documents on-the-fly by user request. This functionality has to be supported by the underlying multimedia document model. This diploma thesis shows that in particular a multimedia document model has to offer support for reusability, for interaction, for adaptation to user specific needs, and for the presentation-independent description of multimedia document content. It is illustrated that the multimedia document standards MHEG-5, HyTime, and SMIL do not sufficiently support these features. Therefore, the new ZYX document model has been developed which allows for fine-grained reuse of document content, for software-based search and selection of reusable fragments, for modelling of interaction, for adaptation of document content to user specific needs, and for an easy conversion to other multimedia document standards. A database capable of managing ZYX documents is implemented as a DataBlade module for the ORDBMS Informix Dynamic Server/ Universal Data Option. Server-based functionality is provided to allow for easy access and creation of ZYX document content, for performing adaptation, and for conversion of ZYX documents to a XML-based format.

Top