Engineering Via Discourse: Content Structure as an Essential Component for Multimedia Documents.

Practical problems of multimedia document production require software engineers to provide an effective framework for inter-professional work. This paper distinguishes between abstract and physical media and hence provides the basis for definitions of multiple media and multimedia and the context for reviewing content structures proven in other disciplines. Such structures can act as a guide for production and the notion of the navigable discourse structure provides the essential means for testing content design. Combining these structures in a discourse driven process model and production method facilitates both the design of content and the development of associated software in an ordered and integrated manner, thus avoiding the pitfalls of ad hoc approaches. Investigation and testing of these concepts was effected via two case studies involving the production of two multimedia demonstrations of software engineering tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]