Guilherme F. Lima
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present the conversion of NCL to Smix and discuss its main implications. NCL is a declarative language for the specification of interactive multimedia presentations which was adopted by the ITU-T H.761 recommendation for interoperable IPTV services. Smix is a synchronous domain-specific language with a similar purpose, but with a simpler and more precise semantics. By implementing NCL over Smix, we bring to the former the notions of reaction and execution instants, and with them some benefits. From a practical perspective, we fix the semantics of the converted documents, get a leaner NCL player (the Smix interpreter), and simplify further conversions. From a systems-design perspective, the structured conversion of NCL to Smix helps us tame the complexity of mapping the user-oriented constructs of NCL into the machine-oriented primitives that realize them as a multimedia presentation. In the paper, we present NCL and Smix, discuss related work on document conversion, and detail the conversion process and a prototype implementation.
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Index Terms
- Converting NCL Documents to Smix and Fixing Their Semantics and Interpretation in the Process
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