Project WAM

In this page: Research Topics | Software

WAM is a joint research team of INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes, CNRS, université Joseph Fourier, université Pierre Mendès-France and Grenoble INP. WAM was created in January 2003 as a follow-up of project Opera.

Objectives

Project WAM aims at making it easier to develop and use rich multimedia contents and applications on the web. Particular attention is paid to documents and applications that tightly integrate different types of media objects, be they discrete (text, images, equations) or continuous (video, audio, animations). Multimedia resources are distributed, linked together, and use platform-neutral formats, which make them usable by anyone through different kinds of terminals and networks.

Research Topics

In this perspective, WAM addresses four key issues:

Multimedia models and formats

Models and formats used for sharing multimedia content on the web must represent the many facets of multimedia documents. Their richness and versatility determine how multimedia content can be processed and used in various contexts.

XML processing

XML is the ground on which web multimedia formats are built. It is therefore crucial to better understand how XML structures can be handled, and what are the theoretical tools that may help to develop an effective framework for processing XML structures.

Multimedia authoring

Authors of multimedia documents and applications need help from specialized tools to benefit from the many, complex possibilities offered by web formats. Methods used for static textual documents do not work for dynamic multimedia web resources. New approaches have to be developed and experimented.

Augmented Environments

Multimedia web formats, XML technologies, and new authoring techniques enable innovative applications that combine web resources with data from the real world to allow users of mobile devices to interact in many different ways with their environment.

More details are available in the team annual report.

Software

WAM develops software tools to support this research activity:

Amaya

An Open Source web editor developed jointly with W3C to ease editing, publishing and sharing of complex web pages containing text (in HTML, XHTML), graphics (in SVG) and mathematical expressions (in MathML), with style sheets (in CSS).

LimSee3

A multimedia authoring tool that aims at flexibility and easiness of use through an advanced multimedia document model based on templates.

XML Reasoning Solver

A tool for the static analysis of XPath queries and XML schemas based on the latest theoretical advances. It allows to solve many fundamental XML problems such as satisfiability of XPath expressions in the presence of XML schemas, containment and equivalence of XPath expressions, and many other problems that can be formulated with XPath expressions and schemas (DTDs, XML Schemas, Relax NGs).

Timesheets Library

A timesheet scheduler implementing (in JavaScript) the SMIL Timing and Synchronization module and the SMIL Timesheets specification. This allows HTML5 pages to be animated and synchronized in a declarative way. The synchronization engine is complemented by a WYSIWYG, Mozilla-based, multimedia page authoring tool for HTML5 documents synchronized by timesheets.

ARIA

The ARIA library (A2ML Reference Implementation API) is an open source API for using A2ML documents on mobile devices. It makes it easy to add advanced interactive audio to any mobile application through the use of the A2ML format.

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