The Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp, the pre-competitive research and development co-operative in Austin, Texas dreamed up by Control Data Corp founder William Norris and owned by most of the major US computer and semiconductor companies, has launched Phase I of a major research project intended to speed development and deployment of easy-to-use hypermedia authoring tools. Hughes Training Inc, Motorola Inc, GK Intelligent Systems Inc are among the sponsors of Phase I of the HyMPACT Hypermedia Presentation Authoring & Composition Technologies project: HyMPACT is developing a prototype set of hypermedia authoring tools for Windows NT for use in industrial, manufacturing and educational settings, and the co-op has settled on job training as a test environment for the HyMPACT project because improving job training is a significant challenge faced by US companies, organisations and government agencies. The project will have five priority areas. Authoring tools aims to give users an easy means to bring together text, audio, and video in a multimedia presentation rather as desktop publishing software enables users to integrate text and graphics in a document. Composition and presentation models will provide embedded theoretical models for composing and viewing hypermedia presentations. Intelligent assistance will enable the authoring, composition and presentation applications to infer the most effective ways for individual users to interact with them. Embedded intelligence will provide authors and users with intuitive paths to more effective information content creation and presentation, it claims.- Multimedia data access will provide users with links to external databases, working with the companion InfoSleuth Project, which will provide intelligent agents to seek and retrieve user-requested information across distributed networks such as the Internet. Delivery issues will include automatic conversion of multimedia information between formats.
