HyTime as the muItimedia document model of choice

The integration of time dependent media into traditional documents requires a scheme to specify temporal constraints. Every multimedia system develops its own scheme. This fact leads to incompatible systems and applications. This paper argues for considering HyTime as the document model of future multimedia systems or as one the proprietary model can easily be converted to. Therefore the problem of specifying temporal constraints is discussed followed by an introduction into HyTime´s approach. Special attention is given to HyTime´s separation between the logical level of media items and the level of actual storage entities which facilitates the reuse of media resources. A discussion of the temporal constraints schemes of three major multimedia systems found in literature and how they could be mapped to HyTime ends the paper