Multimedia authoring based on templates and semi-automatic generated wizards

• Authors: Roberto Gerson de Albuquerque Azevedo;Rodrigo Costa Mesquita Santos;Eduardo Cruz Araújo;Luiz Fernando Gomes Soares;Carlos de Salles Soares Neto
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Document engineering
• Year: 2013

Templates have been used to engage non-expert multimedia authors as content producers. In template-based authoring, templates with most of the relevant application logic and application constraints are developed by experts, who must also specify the template semantics, report which are the required gaps to be filled in, and how to do so. Filling template's gaps is the single task left to inexperienced users to produce the final applications. To do that, they usually must understand the padding instructions reported by template authors and learn some specific padding language. An alternative is using specific GUI components created specifically to each new developed template. This paper proposes a semi-automatic generation of GUI Wizards to guide end(-user) authors to create multimedia applications. The wizard can be tuned to improve the communication between the template author and the template end user, and also if the template specification is not complete. Many successful trial cases show that the generated wizards are usually simple enough to be used by non-experts. The contributions coming from this paper is not constrained to any specific template language or final-application format. Nevertheless, aiming at testing the proposal it was instantiated to work with TAL (Template Authoring Language) whose template processors can generate applications in different target languages.