Supporting manufacturing process analysis and trouble shooting with ACTS

This paper presents a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) prototype tool called ACTS (Annotation Collaboration Tool via SMIL-Synchronized Multimedia Integrated Language), which was designed to meet the user requirements of a distributed, collaborative team performing remote analysis of robotic welds. Based on open standards such as W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) SMIL, ACTS provides a framework of temporal and spatial synchronization for multimedia data streams. An annotation facility provides for asynchronous collaboration among colleagues. ACTS uses the NIST-developed S2M2 Java applet-based SMIL player that implements and extends the SMIL 1.0 specification. Future work is also discussed.