Money Dollars: The Need for an Editor for Producing SVG Movies

It would be interesting to know whether any companies or researchers, are working on a visual development environment for creating SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) movies, and interactive components. This would be very useful, Flash, Viewlet Builder, and many other tools are good for creating movies and interactive presentations. However there is a need for something that has this ease of use, and produces the same kind of output, using open standard SVG.

This would provide the capability to represent each picture in an alternative way for the blind. Without this functionality, web developers need to manually provide a separate representation for blind people. I doubt that every web developer does this. The SVG output could be the basis of providing a Flash movie, from which information could be extracted automatically. This extracted information would provide the alternative representation for blind people and non-Flash users. Also such a tool would be very good for allowing information to be extracted from the picture, e.g. values and labels from a graph, or attributes from a part diagram.

If the SVG items are grouped in an appropriate way this could make it possible to allow extraction of objects and properties represented in SVG that have a clear meaning. Adobe has acquired http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html, so perhaps they're doing something similar to Flash but with an SVG output? It would be good to see an automatic way of providing the sort of functionality illustrated at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/InteractiveSVGExamples.htm. This is output automatically from a taxonomy represented in Protege, through a Decision support system DecisionPro http://www.vanguardsw.com/.

This sort of thinking ahead by software suppliers would make it much easier for ordinary users to provide good interactive content for the web. This is the basis of 'End User Development', a technique for making it easier for computer literate non-developers to create software. In this case the application of this technique would be enabling the construction of accessible interactive web pages.

I am a Researcher in the final year of my PhD. I specialise in applying Semantic Web techniques. My current research is on a technique of 'User Driven Modelling/Programming'. My intention is to enable non-programmers to create software from a user interface that allows them to model a particular problem or scenario. This involves a user entering information visually in the form of a tree diagram. I am attempting to develop ways of automatically translating this information into program code in a variety of computer languages. This is very important and useful for many employees that have insufficient time to learn programming languages. I am looking to research visualisation, and visualisation techniques to create a human computer interface that allows non experts to create software.

I am a member of the Institute for End User Computing - www.ieuc.org/home.html.

My Home Page is www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/.

A web page for this article is at www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/EndUserHistory.htm.

Money Dollars

Saturday, September 29, 2007

The Need for an Editor for Producing SVG Movies

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