Template-based, format-extensible authoring for BS digital data broadcast service

This paper describes the outline of a template-based authoring system for BS digital data broadcast service starting from December 2000 in Japan. The system is designed to compose multimedia documents in BML (Broadcast Markup Language) format. BML is an XML based data specification language adopted as Japanese standard for the service. The authoring system provides template functions to combine XML data sources with BML style templates. Also it provides data-binding rules with the templates to generate BML instances automatically. The templates and the rules are extensible so that they can generate multi-format contents written in BML and HTML for cross-media services.