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Multimedia software engineering is an emerging area combining software engineering, multimedia computing, visual languages and visualization. We can view multimedia software engineering from two different, yet complementary, perspectives: (1) to apply multimedia computing, visual languages and visualization to the practice of software engineering; and (2) to apply software engineering principles to the development of multimedia applications and systems. This chapter surveys some of the approaches and recent advances in multimedia software engineering.

This paper proposes automatic generation of animated weather reports, where a virtual human performs as a weatherman, as an example of automated TV-like program production. An input to our prototype system is a set of (location, time, weather)-type weather forecast data. The system then summarizes the data and makes a weather report scenario in the form of speech texts with embedded commands, most of which relate to the virtual weatherman's body language. From this command-embedded speech text, our virtual human presenter system makes the virtual human agent act as a weatherman with the weather charts in real-time 3D animation synchronized with speech outputs. When the system runs on a Web server, on-demand speech-text generation enables us to watch personalized and up-to-the-minute weather reports on the Web.

The paper studies database publishing technologies based on the WWW. The dramatic progress of the Internet, especially the WWW, makes it possible for people to share database information in a very large scale. Database publishing is an important application in this area and it involves the key technologies, such as the HTTP protocol, server technology, client browser technology, markup language HTML, etc. Typically, there are two means to publish databases on the web: CGI-based and Java-Based. This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods. Then, it puts forward an approach to database publishing based on a new model: the extension of HTTP. The result of a preliminary evaluation shows that the new model is an efficient approach.