TAO: Temporal Algebraic Operators for modeling multimedia presentations

This paper presents TAO: a language based on Temporal Algebraic Operators for composing complex multimedia presentations. Unlike traditional approaches used to specify multimedia presentations, TAO relies on a well-defined semantics with an underlying temporal model based on intervals and causal relations between time points. We derive some properties of TAO presentations and show how to execute TAO presentations on an execution engine: a TAO presentation is compiled into a set of instructions interpreted by the execution engine.