Abstract

As a multimedia mail is typically constructed over a period of time and has different mail readers, it is inevitable that its structure may change over time. In this thesis, we design a multimedia mail system with real-time scheduling support for authoring and presentation. We use the term authoring for the composition of a multimedia mail, and presentation for the reading of the mail. The major design objectives include flexible temporal and spatial specification, efficient algorithms to support incremental consistency check, presentation schedule generation, and effective editing/filter functions for both authors and readers.