41. Conclusions

We believe that the DAGS Multimedia Proceedings series is a step towards academic publications that more fully reproduce the experience of a live conference or classroom. Currently such publications are still one of a kind, expensive to produce, and with clear but unmeasured advantages over their traditional counterparts. Our experience highlights some shortcomings, but also suggests that, with further research, improved systems can be built with less effort, and greater rewards.

As we have shown here the usefulness of hypermedia products is greatly enhanced by tightly linking different media types such as digital talks and hypertext papers, implementing an integrated hypermedia environment where the sum is greater than its parts. On the other hand, there is no use in introducing a new media type for its own sake, if a simpler representation completes the task as well: the talks interface can be reduced to a view of synchronized slide images combined with audio of the speakers voice (rather than offering video of a gesturing speaker), without substantially compromising the overall experience of the talk.

For multimedia publishing to really take off, the authoring and editing process needs to be greatly improved. Obvious improvements are to automate repetitive tasks and to optimize the initial content gathering process to collect raw material in a format suitable for further processing. The DAGS multimedia proceedings projects showed that the turnaround time of the creation process for hypermedia products can be reduced significantly by using tools such as the AWCF application and VideoScheme that facilitate the integration of different multimedia objects and automate basic hypertext and multimedia authoring.

Obviously, hypermedia publishing will not replace the printed book in the near future. Rather, different media types will coexist peacefully for quite some time. Nevertheless, as we are finally getting close to the environment envisioned by Vannevar Bush [Bus45] fifty years ago, hypermedia documents offer a uniquely integrated environment that can not be simulated on paper. We hope that our experience collected with various hypermedia projects described in this book will assist others in creating similar hyperdocuments with less effort, but as much fun and pleasure as we had.