Methods for authoring and interacting with multimedia representations of documents

摘要

A method, apparatus and article of manufacture for assisting a user with authoring a multimedia representation of documents. In one embodiment, the method comprises displaying one or more visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements from an input document in graphical user interface; and selecting one or more elements and for inclusion in a multimedia representation.

主权项

1. A method comprising:
extracting a plurality of visual, audible, and audiovisual document elements from content contained within an input document, wherein the input document comprises a single file; displaying at least one visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements from the extracted visual, audible, and audiovisual document elements of the input document in a graphical user interface; automatically selecting two or more of the extracted visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements for inclusion in a multimedia thumbnail representation of the input document based on a time attribute and an information attribute associated with each of the extracted visual, audible, and audiovisual document elements to maximize a total of information content provided by the selected visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements in a given amount of time, wherein the automatically selecting comprises calculating a time attribute and an information attribute for each of the extracted visual, audible, and audiovisual document elements and selecting one or more visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements based on each time attribute and each information attribute, wherein each time attribute is calculated, using one or more characteristics of a device that is to display the multimedia representation, to determine a minimum presentation time for a user to comprehend each of the extracted visual, audible, and audiovisual document elements, and wherein each information attribute is calculated, using one or more application constraints, to determine an amount of information content that is contained in each of the extracted visual, audible, and audiovisual document elements, and wherein automatically selecting two or more of the extracted visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements to maximize the total of information content provided by the selected visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements in the given amount of time, further comprises:
selecting audible document elements that maximize an amount of information contained in the selected audible document elements when presented in one or more time intervals of an audible channel of the multimedia representation that have not been filled with audio data associated with the selected audiovisual elements, andfilling the one or more time intervals of the audible channel with the selected audible document elements; and automatically generating the multimedia representation based on the automatically selected one or more visual, audible, or audiovisual document elements.