Integrating Planning and Task-based Design for Multimedia Presentation

Abstract

We claim that automatic multimedia presentation can be modeled by integrating two complementary approaches to automatic design: hierarchical planning to achieve communicative goals, and task-based graphic design. The interface between the two approaches is a domain and media independent layer of communicative goals and actions. A planning process decomposes domain-specific goals to domain-independent goals, which in turn are realized by media-specific techniques. One of these techniques is taskbased graphic design. We apply our approach to presenting information from large data sets using natural language and information graphics.