To: Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl cc: Lynda.Hardman@cwi.nl, Sjoerd.Mullender@cwi.nl, Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl, Lloyd.Rutledge@cwi.nl Subject: HyTime 97 Trip Report Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Tue, 02 Sep 1997 15:52:00 +0200 From: Lloyd Rutledge TRIP REPORT FOR HYTIME 97 On August 19-20, 1997 I attended and gave an hour-long presentation at the 4th Annual International HyTime conference. The presentation was titled "Putting the Media Back in Hypermedia: HyTime for Portable Hypermedia Documents". It described our group's use of HyTime within the CMIF project and the issues involved. The talk focussed on the interactive and multimedia issues involved with the use of HyTime, contrasting with the general HyTime community's focus on text. The HyTime user community currently consists of a small but steadily growing collection of large organizations maintaining large and complex document sets. This presentation helped establish CWI as a leading researcher of interactive multimedia applications of HyTime. It also helped develop relationships with industry leaders who can assist in guiding the direction of this research. The second edition of the HyTime standard document was announced at the conference. "Second edition" is the new name for what had until recently been called HyTime's "technical corrigendum", representing that substantial changes to HyTime have been made. I have obtained a copy of the second edition. This conference was pivotal in comparison to previous HyTime conferences because of the larger number of attendees and the larger number of applications and software presented. Several companies discussed their use of HyTime in ongoing projects. Several vendors displayed software performing HyTime processing. It showed that HyTime is being used and software is being produced to meet the industry's current needs for HyTime. However, the software remains relatively small scale, and both the software and current industry applications of HyTime still do not address the interactive and multimedia issues that have been the focus of our group's research. At the conference I met with three of the leaders in the development of HyTime: Steve Newcomb, Charles Goldfarb, and Elliot Kimber. Steve Newcomb is the president of TechnoTeacher, the main developer of large-scale HyTime software, and was the chair of the conference. He visited CWI in April and we have been in regular contact ever since. Charles Goldfarb was the editor of SGML and HyTime and is a private SGML consultant. He briefly described a new WG8 ISO effort called Interchange Standard for Multimedia Interactive Documents. (I am seeking more information about this. Perhaps it would be worth our while to be involved, though given MHEG it seems redundant.) Elliot Kimber works for Passage Systems. He has been the major applier over the past several year of HyTime to solving real, large-scale problems for industry. Elliot also gives regular multi-day tutorials of HyTime and was the primary (though unofficial) editor of the second edition. He and I destroyed many place mats and table napkins over two evenings of dinner and drinks discussing the details of HyTime and its application. I met with Filip Evenepoel of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. We have met as several other conferences and he has visited CWI. He proposed a possible collaboration on an Esprit project involving adapting multimedia presentations for disabled users. I met with Christina Portillo of Boeing and asked her about the potential multimedia media needs of the aerospace industry. She mentioned that her company is interested in CBT -- in particular in having one CBT interface be adaptable for presenting different course materials and be adaptable to individual media object updates. In general, though, Boeing is currently interested primarily in text. She suggested we contact Robin Conway at Boeing. I met with Franck Duluc, a student researcher at Aerosppaiale. We have communicated before by email, and he as meet with Gilles Auroux of our Chameleon project to discuss Aerospatiale as a possible Chameleon partner. He describe reluctance to participate as a partner due to "not having yet made enough work to contribute". I met with Gert van der Steen, a consultant at Palstar in Uffelte, Netherlands. He is sponsoring a SGML/HyTime meeting in November which Steve Newcomb is expected to attend. It would probably be worthwhile for us to attend as well.