EDITEC - a graphical editor for hypermedia composite templates

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications Vol. 70; no. 2; pp. 1167 - 1198
• Main Authors: Damasceno, Jean Ribeiro, dos Santos, Joel André Ferreira, Muchaluat-Saade, Débora Christina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01-05-2014; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Analysis; Authoring; Brazil; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Data Structures and Information Theory; Editing; Editors; Hypermedia; Hypertext; Interactive; IPTV; Language; Multimedia; Multimedia computer applications; Multimedia Information Systems; Semantics; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Studies; Television; Authoring tool; XTemplate; Hypermedia composite templates; NCL; Graphical editor
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-013-1734-z

Hypermedia composite templates define generic structures of nodes and links to be added to a document composition, providing spatio-temporal synchronization semantics. This paper presents EDITEC, a graphical editor for hypermedia composite templates. EDITEC templates are based on the XTemplate 3.0 language. The editor was designed for offering a user-friendly visual approach. It presents a new method that provides several options for representing iteration structures graphically, in order to specify a certain behavior to be applied to a set of generic document components. The editor provides a multi-view environment, giving the user a complete control of the composite template during the authoring process. Composite templates can be used in NCL documents for embedding spatio-temporal semantics into NCL contexts. NCL is the standard declarative language used for the production of interactive applications in the Brazilian digital TV system and ITU H.761 IPTV services. Hypermedia composite templates could also be used in other hypermedia authoring languages offering new types of compositions with predefined semantics.