MML: a language for modeling interactive multimedia applications

The development of highly interactive multimedia applications is still a challenging and complex task. In addition to the application logic multimedia applications typically provide a sophisticated user interface with integrated media objects. As a consequence, the development process involves different experts for software design, user interface design, and media design. There is still a lack of concepts for a structured development process to integrate these requirements. In this paper we introduce the Multimedia Modeling Language (MML), a visual modeling language supporting the design process in multimedia application development. It is part of a model-driven development approach for multimedia applications. The language is oriented on well-established software engineering concepts, in particular UML 2.0. It integrates the results of two different research lines: application-oriented multimedia modeling and model-based user interface development. In this paper we describe the concepts of the language and present the modeling process with MML. In particular we show how MML aims to integrate the different developer roles in multimedia application design.