Designing and building multimedia cultural stories using concepts of film theories and logic programming

In this paper we propose a middleware to reuse multimedia resources in order to produce new types of multimedia artifacts. In this work we adopt some basic concepts of film theory, such as the notions of plot, fabula and, in particular, diegetic time. The techniques we use are located within the area of artificial intelligence, using an explicit representation of time. The middleware consists of several modules, some devoted to the semantic annotation of multimedia components, and others to their visualization. Some modules regard the analysis of temporal connectivity and consistency of events. From a methodological point of view, an important module of the middleware contains the representation of a story (time of the narration and time of the story) and the temporal reasoning services, which are both implemented using a logic programming language (Flora2). Finally, there is a module in the middleware that translates the logical representation (in Flora2 language) into SMIL language, which allows the use of the final composition by a standard player. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.