Research On Making And Management Of Xml-Based Multimedia Distance Instruction Courseware

Multimedia distance instruction is a new instruction mode, which has got rapid progress in these years. It's an integration of multimedia technology and networks technology. The core of multimedia distance instruction is teaching source-making and courseware is the principal part of teaching source. With the increasingly popularization of multimedia distance instruction, it's necessary to get a tool to make and manage courseware.Metadata is a tool of describing information source and information source can be communicated and shared via metadata. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a language whose markups can be defined by users. It's the simplified edition recommended by W3C. As a kind of database, XML documents are fit for describing semistructured data. XML Schema is one of the applications of XML, which is used for defining description rules of XML document such as file structure and data type. XML DOM is the interface between application program and XML document.Streaming media is a rising network multimedia format. Its most important character is "downloading and playing". SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is a kind of XML-based network-multimedia application recommended by W3C. Its appearance makes it possible to make synchronized multimedia files released on web in an easy-to-edit way and it has a lot of advantages, for example saving bandwidth and developing easily and so on. The steaming media technology developed by RealNetworks is the most integrated series at present and it has the most powerful function.This paper looks on a multimedia courseware as an integration of five components: video, audio, caption, syllabus and diagram and manages them separately. It adopts XML documents to manage the database of the components, for their metadata structures are tree-structures. It makes it possible to manipulate the database such as insert, delete, update and query. A new-courseware-made procedure is making the components separately first and integrating them afterwards. A courseware is issued by streaming media technology of RealNetworks.This system has a lot of advantages such as easy manipulations and powerful functions. It is easy to share the learning sources among many learning units and improve the efficiency of making courseware. It will accelerate the development of multimedia distance instruction.