JNS: An alternative authoring language for specifying NCL multimedia documents

This paper presents JNS - JSON NCL Script, a declarative authoring language for describing NCL multimedia documents. NCL (Nested Context Language) is a standard language used in the Brazilian Digital Television System and in the ITU H.761 IPTV services recommendation for specifying interactive multimedia applications. Once NCL is XML-based, even simple NCL documents have several lines of code. JNS provides a new way of writing an NCL document, offering a more compact textual representation and providing more expressiveness to NCL. JNS is based on the Java Script Object Notation (JSON) instead of the XML standard. This work presents an overview of the JNS language and the new functionalities it brings to NCL document specification. In addition, comparisons between JNS and NCL specifications are shown.