Towards Constructing a Flexible Multimedia Environment for Teaching the History of Arts

Abstract

Multimedia production displays two faces: a multimedia product is the result of programming as well as of publishing. Constructing a multimedia environment for teaching a course in the history of arts suggests that requirements elicitation has many facets and is central to success, hence has to be delt with in a particularly careful way, the more so since we wanted the art historians working in a specific and custom tailored environment. The problem was technically resolved by constructing a dedicated markup language based on XML. We discuss the process of requirements elicitation that led to the markup language and show how this is used as a cornerstone in the development of such an experimental environment.