Event-based scheduling algorithm for rendering SMIL documents

'Time' and 'user event' facts in a nondeterministic multimedia presentation make it hard for a scheduler to determine when multimedia objects are to be rendered and how long the rendering will be. The paper is about the scheduling algorithm which is responsible for the rendering of multimedia objects used in Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language 2.0 (SMIL2.0). The proposed algorithm, called event-based scheduling (EBS) algorithm, is composed of two steps, a preprocessing step and a rendering step. In the preprocessing step, all user interaction (event) facts and all temporal facts of the start condition are converted into 'event + time' facts. After the preprocessing step that sets the start condition with an 'event + time' fact, an event-based table (waiting list) is generated and used to render multimedia objects in the rendering step.