As cell phones continue to advance messaging capability from text-based Short Message Service (SMS) to content-based Multimedia Message Service (MMS), one major cell phone supplier, Nokia, recently adopted the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) technology to support various media type file formats, including GIF (fixed and animated) and JPEG images, MIDI and AMR audio, and H.263 video. In addition to fully utilizing the SMIL functionality, developers can now build presentations that interact with users by authoring multimedia presentations, and coordinate the position and timing during presentations of media elements such as images, audio, video, and text.

The underlying technology was based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) SMIL profile – a subset of the full SMIL 2.0 language, in which Wo Chang, of the Information Access Division, was heavily involved by hosting and editing the SMIL 2.0 interoperability test suite. This interoperability test suite was seen by W3C as vital for SMIL 2.0 to become a W3C Recommendation. Announced and released on August 9, 2001, the SMIL 2.0 Recommendation represents a cross-industry agreement on an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations.

Chang has a long association with the W3C. He is one of the original members of SYMM WG which was started in 1996. He helped to create one of the early SMIL 1.0 public reference implementations and hosted the SMIL 1.0 interoperability test suite via the Web. In addition, he helped organize the first SMIL 1.0 interoperability tests at NIST in March 1998. Major participants who use the test suite include: Glocomm, IBM, Intel, Macromedia, Microsoft, Netscape/AOL, Nokia, Oratrix, Panasonic, Philips, RealNetworks, WGBH, CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, the Netherlands), INRIA (Institut National De Recherce en Informatique et en Automatique, France), and NIST.

CONTACT: Wo Chang, ext. 3439