An ICON programming technique for multimedia presentation designs

Relations among temporal intervals can be used to assist the automatic generation of multimedia presentations. The authors analyze the domains of interval temporal relations. A set of algorithms is proposed to derive reasonable relations between intervals. Possible conflicts in the user specification are firstly detected and eliminated. The mechanism then constructs partial order relations among temporal intervals before the presentation time chart is built. The algorithm is extended for objects in an arbitrary n-dimensional space. Thus, presentation layouts in 2D space, or virtual reality object representations in 3D space can be constructed. They use the algorithms to design a reasoning system that generates the schedule and layout of multimedia presentations.