Media Sink Elements for Modeling Data-Driven Multimedia Presentations

This article introduces the "media sink element" for modeling data-driven multimedia presentations. A media sink element refers to a media operator used for hiding certain constituent parts of a media item during the presentations. Based on the framework of the ZyX model, we propose several fundamental types of media sink elements, including the image sink, the audio sink, and the text sink. Detailed comparisons in various aspects between a Sink-enhanced model and the conventional document models are discussed. A Sink- Enhanced model has advantages including enhancing the expressive power that is often required in real-life applications, reducing the complexity of the document tree of a multimedia presentation, and improving the reusability in different levels of granularity.