This paper discusses work accomplished by Chambel and Guimar¿es, who are informatics professionals, on a critical issue facing all developers of multimedia content: how to effectively incorporate and relate all media to achieve the goals of the project. To simplify, if you have some video that seems to relate to the topic of interest, do you have the text linked to the video or the video linked to the text? Are there links to specific parts of the video or are there embedded hot links from various parts of the video to the text or other media? The challenges are not just how to do this easily, but, even more importantly perhaps, when to do it and for which users of the content. As the authors say, “How do you provide the perception of context to users or readers?”

Some case studies and a hyper video model are described in the paper, and the authors establish a vocabulary for their work. They built a framework from Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), called HTIMEL, by adding new elements and attributes to dynamic HTML, along with VBScript and ActiveMovie, to generate HTIMEL code for their work. The idea is to use HTIMEL to experiment with various kinds of media integration. There is a lot of work to do in this area, as the authors point out, from carrying out experiments of various scenarios to building tools for authors and building useful end-user interfaces. This area of work is critical to the success of many convergence endeavors, and will need people in many skills areas to make it successful.