Integrating planning and task-based design for multimedia presentation

Abstract

We claim that automatic multimedia presentation can be modeled by integrating two complementary approaches to automatic design: hierarchical planning to achieve communicative goals, and task-based graphic design. The interface between the two approaches is a domain and media independent layer of communicative goals and actions. A planning process decomposes domain-specific goals to domain-independent goals, which in turn are realized by media-specific techniques. One of these techniques is taskbased graphic design. We apply our approach to presenting information from large data sets using natural language and information graphics. Keywords Multimedia presentation, information seeking tasks, media allocation, information graphics, presentation planning. INTRODUCTION Understanding large data sets and explaining them to others via effective displays is a complex, laborious and time consuming activity. Analysts and other types of specialists on a daily and sometimes hourly basis explor...