40.2 Improving the Development Process

There are two related issues that need to be addressed to improve the development process, namely automation and time-to-delivery. Developing multimedia products is still a very labor-intensive process. To reduce manual efforts, as many activities in the development process as possible have to be executed automatically by the computer. Automation also leads to shorter production cycles, as single steps in the development process can be executed faster or iteratively, if some hidden bug discovered late in the software life-cycle makes it necessary to redo earlier steps.

Minimize production turn-around

When designing and implementing systems like the DAGS multimedia proceedings, there is always a tradeoff between timely delivery and sophistication of provided features. Contrarily to publishing on CD-ROM, publication on the Internet can be an ongoing creation and improvement process that may even preclude the conference for some sections. It is therefore much easier to publish conference proceedings on the web in a piecewise fashion, bringing additional proceedings parts on-line as soon as they are completed.

Improved production time by restricted functionality

Compared to the hard-wired functionality of web browsers, CD-ROM authoring tools offer much greater flexibility. But this flexibility has its price: Because the layout of the DAGS'95 proceedings was limited by the features available in HTML 3.0, production time for web proceedings was reduced, as there simply was no temptation to support additional elaborate graphic features.

Use advanced multimedia authoring tools

Editing audio for clarity can be supported by tools like VideoScheme described in part III. We have already made some encouraging experiments using VideoScheme to remove pauses and noise words from audio sources automatically.

Converting linear text to a hypertext hierarchy

Converting linear text to a hierarchy of hypertext nodes such that the semantic structure of the original document is maintained is a very complicated and domain-knowledge intensive process. This process can only be automated if authors follow guidelines of the publishing editors in hierarchically structuring their document in advance. This hierarchical structure can the be exploited to allow for hierarchical navigation such as the one supported by the Gloor/Dynes hypertext engine.

Collect raw material

Besides identifying technical improvements for future CD-ROM and web-based proceedings, working on the DAGS proceedings also taught us lessons for content gathering. Provisions should be made such that speakers reliably submit slide and other material used at their own accord. Using volunteers to collect slides from speakers after the conference is difficult, especially if many talks are held simultaneously. Furthermore, speakers are often distracted by discussions with participants after the talk and are hardly accessible to volunteers collecting the slides. Our solution that worked only partly was to notify speakers in advance of this requirement and to ask session chairs to collect a copy of the slides before the presentation.