FOHM+RTSP: Applying Open Hypermedia and Temporal Linking to Audio Streams

The World Wide Web (WWW) was originally designed to handle relatively simple files, containing just text and graphics. With the development of more advanced Web browsers and streaming media protocols, it can now be used for the real-time delivery, display and playback of different types of media, including audio and video. The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) has also been developed, to create and stream multimedia presentations over the Web. Both the WWW and SMIL however embed the hypertext link information, to the different types of media, within their documents. This makes the link information easier to transport but considerably harder to maintain. As a result of this problem, the WWW is sometimes referred to as a "closed" hypermedia system. This paper describes how Open Hypermedia Systems (OHSs) can be used to solve this problem of embedded links. It also describes how a streaming media protocol, the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), can be extended to support Open Hypermedia and temporal linking, specifically in the audio domain.