Why a MultiMedia Catalogue?

Education builds more and more on multimedia technology to supplement but also compete with traditional ways of learning.

The overall cost to produce multimedia content is still high and authors are confronted with a range of special purpose tools. They include a growing collection of proprietary authoring, imaging, graphics, sound and video editing tools but also traditional programming tools centered around novel programming languages like Java, Delphi, or Visual Basic. Many content authors have not been trained to use such tools effectively. For them it would be much easier to reuse existing materials. In addition, the reuse of multimedia materials helps to massively cut down production costs.

To improve the process of creating multimedia courses, a component-based hypermedia development method has been developed. This method is centered around a Multimedia Catalogue for component maintenance and publication and an easy to use authoring environment that supports Catalogue users in the task of integrating reusable components to coherent courses.

The Multimedia Catalogue is fully based on Open Source Software including the Apache Web-Server and the PostgreSQL database. The Catalogue supports other external databases as well and can accommodate any metadata schema for describing the multimedia components it maintains. By default the Catalogue supports the IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard.

The core of the system is a sophisticated hypertext system that enforces a strict separation of content, presentation and navigation and gives the user the power of bidirectional links and link consistency at any time.