The MAVA Approach

Abstract

The broadening use of multimedia documents and the need to apply them to the field of higher education increase the demands a multimedia document system has to be tailored to. Simplifying the production and presentation of multimedia documents in a user-friendly way is a precondition for the advancement of multimedia in higher education. Further requirements to a multimedia system should be reusability and retrievability of documents, platform independence and an extensibility which allows to adapt the system to application specific needs. Particularly in the field of education multimedia documents should be more than view-only animations and allow an active appropriation of knowledge by offering interactive functionality. Another property useful for an application of multimedia documents in higher education is database connectivity. The multimedial document system MAVA ("Multimedia Document Versatile Architecture") meets these demands by using an accordant meta-document model as well as highly compatible internet standards like Java and XML. A MAVA user does not need programming knowledge at all since the system contains an editor which allows editing a document by means of a graphic user interface. MAVA documents can be displayed with minimal requirements at any time. Required media items are loaded dynamically prior to the presentation. Due to open interfaces the MAVA system can be extended by additionally required application specific components. MAVA was implemented and tested in a project conducted by the Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems (IPVR) of the University of Stuttgart in co-operation with the Library of the University of Stuttgart. The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and has a successor project which aims to design and implement new extensions and to integrate MAVA into the libraries fulltext system OPUS (Online Publications of the University of Stuttgart).