Multimedia data have properties different from traditional alpha-numeric data types. Among them, the temporal property of multimedia data requires the synchronization during the presentation time. The multimedia synchronization is classified into two levels. The intra-media synchronization means continuous supply of media segments data whereas the inter-media synchronization means temporal relationships among media segments. The intra-media synchronization is a research issue of operating systems, media format encoding/decoding and hardware for media segments. There exist researches on temporal modeling to represent temporal relationships among media data segments in multimedia databases.
In this thesis, we are concerned with the presentation scheduling technique for the inter-media synchronization. The presentation scheduler is responsible for ensuring temporal relationships specified in the temporal model of multimedia databases under system delay while presentation. The Size of multimedia data is often very big and multimedia data need complex decoding schemes. These may cause considerable amount of delay. The multimedia presentation scheduler is an essential part of the front end of various multimedia applications such as multimedia information services and multimedia authoring tools. We first analyze problems of original presentation scheduling algorithm for the TPN(Timed petri Net) model and we propose a new presentation scheduling algorithm to overcome the problems. Additionally, the proposed presentation scheduler has the capability of a partial interval presentation. Finally, we implemented the proposed presentation scheduler using the MS-Visual C++ language under MS-Windows 95.
