1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of, and apparatus for, composing a media article.
2. Related Art
Media articles portray content (whether real, imagined or computer-generated) to a person's senses. Media articles can be presented to a person via a variety of media, including text, voice, sound, pictures or moving images.
As recording technologies have improved, the amount of recorded media articles available to a consumer has grown rapidly. Media articles are often recorded in media files (note that although the plural ‘media’ is used here, ‘media file’ is to be understood to include both files which are intended to be conveyed to user by only one medium—e.g. text or speech and also ‘multimedia’ files whose meaning is conveyed by a plurality of media). The Internet is the most recent communications network to emerge and provides worldwide transmission of recorded digital media files representing text, sound, pictures, moving images or a combination of these. Since the number of media files accessible via the internet is so large, there is a need to label media files with some description of what they contain. Thus, for example, HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) files contain ‘meta’ tags which include keywords which indicate what subjects are covered in the web-page presented to the user.
Labelling media files with metadata is made more beneficial when a group of users agree on how that metadata should be structured and the elements it should contain. Often, XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) is used to define such structure and the elements contained within that structure. In effect, XML can be used to define metadata ‘languages’. One example of such a metadata ‘language’ is StoryML, as discussed in “StoryML: An XML Extension for Woven Stories” by P. Gerdt et al, pp 893 to 902 of the proceedings of the Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference 2002. StoryML is a metadata language designed to describe a contribution to a collaboratively written story. As such it includes elements giving the author of the contribution and the contributions relationship to other contributions.
A proposal for adding metadata to video files (the ‘Multimedia Content Description Interface’ more widely known as MPEG-7) is being discussed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group.
International Patent application WO 02/057959 discloses computer software providing a user with a tool to organise media files. Various metadata can be associated with those files. The files and the metadata are stored in a ‘relational’ database—note that ‘relational’ as used in the expression relational database has little to do with relations between the database entries or what is represented in those entries—instead it refers to a ‘relation’ in the sense that word is used in mathematical set theory.
One method of composing a media article involves the putting together of a plurality of components. For example, a film is made up of a plurality of scenes as set out in a screenplay. There have been some attempts to create a media article automatically in this way. For example, the production of a Waltz in accordance with a musical dice game has been provided. Similarly, an automatic story generation program, the Romance Writer is available.