SIMPEL: a superimposed multimedia presentation editor and player

Summary form only given. In a variety of applications such as learning, we need to integrate multimedia information into convenient packages. The challenges involved in this process are: selecting or working with information elements at sub-document level while retaining the original context; describing the integration or packaging of such elements; and making use of minimal storage during this activity. We developed the superimposed multimedia presentation editor and player (SIMPEL), a tool to address these challenges. SIMPEL allows a user to reference information of many types, at varying granularity, without replicating the referenced information. It also allows the user to compose synchronized multimedia presentations. SIMPEL is in a genre of applications called superimposed applications (SAs), which allow users to superimpose new interpretations over existing or base information. SAs employ "marks", references to selected regions within base information. SIMPEL uses the superimposed pluggable architecture for contexts and excerpts (SPARCE), middleware that provides mark management and other services for SAs. SIMPEL has been implemented for Windows in Visual Basic.NET and uses XML for storing presentation data