This is an introduction to who i am:
I am Jeff Tanner, currently a very new senior staff programmer at Sybase.
My continuous quest for the past ten years in the integration
of knowledge of various forms with communication. so here goes a
way too long presentation of my background and what i may contribute...
...at Intellicorp: I built and consulted in CLOS-based CASE tools for
knowledge system development. Its primary output was ASCII
and 2.5D graphics. It was easy to catigorize text (SGML) and
style (TEX and Postscript) and simple object-based graphics,
but slowly creeping in the mid 80's was
the integration of audio, animation, and video; so i sought
other horizons...
...at Macromind: I programmed with the Director development team with a
focused interest on LINGO (HyperTalk with single-level objects
and temporal extentions for sprite management). Cool language,
however, it still lacked tagging of the sprites, channels,
scenes, etc...after a couple of years of Director and MediaMaker,
i sought out video...
...at Digital FX: working on non-linear editing products, the biggest
issues that arose were: how to tag scenes, transitions, characters,
overlay graphics, shooting-angles...but the greatest issue was
disk space. providing solutions in DVI and JPEG takes up a huge
huge amount of disk space (in a 1G drive: 30min for VHS quality
and 5 min for Betacam-SP quality), so could non-linear video production
be tagged and distributed within a FDDI LAN enviroment. DFX
was on a bad downward side (now defunct)...
...at Apple: lead architect for a video server solution within
LAN-based environments and media infomatics solutions.
Again, could QuickTime or any media-rich document be tagged with
with SGML, HTML, HyTime, or even RTF
for query retrieval by either LAN or Internet based clients.
The two-year investigation and development led to prototype
delivery, however, Apple's financial focus was not
towards new distributed solutions but towards the PowerPC and
Newton...
...SO, is see this interest in VRML. While I trying to force tagging
of temporal knowledge with a static style type markup languages
(frustrating to say the least), i would be an eager participant
in this endevor...
best regards to all,
jeff