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<Paper uid="W98-0210">
  <Title>A Media-Independent Content Language for Integrated Text and Graphics Generation</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="73" end_page="74" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Related Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Several projects have studied the problem of media-independent knowledge representation schemes for automatic generation of multimedia presentations. The COMET \[Feiner and McKeown1991\] and WIP \[Wahlster et ah1993\] systems generate instructions for operating physical devices, and \[Maybury1991\] describes a system that designs narrated or animated route directions in a cartographic information system. These systems represent content about complex sequences of actions the user can perform on the physical device and their effects, as well as spatial con- null cepts. However, this work is not relevant to information graphics generation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The multimedia system whose focus is closest to ours, PostGraphe \[Fasciano and Lapalme1996\], is a system that generates multimedia statistical reports consisting of graphics and text. However, there are some fundamental differences with our approach. First, in Postgraphe it is assumed that a presentation is about the entire dataset, whereas our content language can be used to describe subsets and individuals in the dataset. Second, in Postgraphe graphics are generated directly from its knowledge representation language; then text is generated based upon the graphics. Thus, it is not clear whether the language is truly media-independent, i.e., whether it could be used to generate text directly. Also, Postgraphe's language of intentions is less general than our approach of generating presentation plans for achieving communicative goals. For example, in Postgraphe the language can be used to specify the intention to compare two variables of a dataset in a way that emphasizes an increase. In our approach, complex arguments can be planned.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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