XSLT for Tailored Access to a Digital Video Library.

The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University has created a multi-terabyte digital video library consisting of thousands of hours of video, segmented into over 50,000 stories, or documents. Since Informedia's inception in 1994, numerous interfaces have been developed and tested for accessing this library, including work on multimedia abstractions, or surrogates, which represent a video document in an abbreviated manner. The utility and efficiency of these surrogates have been reported in detail elsewhere, validated through a number of usability methods, including transaction log analysis, formal empirical studies, contextual inquiry, heuristic evaluation, and cognitive walkthroughs. This paper begins with an introduction to a few of these interfaces and their implementation history. The promise of Web technologies is then discussed, particularly the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), leading to a presentation of the Informedia digital video library delivered through a Web browser via XML and XSLT. Emphasis is placed on the tailored accessibility offered by this information architecture, with specific examples given as evidence. The paper concludes with a discussion of next steps planned for the Informedia library work. (Contains 19 references.) (AEF)