Research

Computer Technology Timeline

In 1900 Greek sponge drivers discovered an astonishingly intricate mechanism in Antikythera, an island near Crete. A Greek sponge diver, Elias Stadiatos, discovered the wreck of a cargo ship with statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be a few green, corroded lumps—the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device. The device was in the shipwreck of a commercial boat dated at the first century BC located near to cape Glyfada in Potamakia position 60m under the sea and 30m from the shore of the small island of Antikythera. This device now known as the Antikythera device represents the most sophisticated machinery found to date from antiquity; as such its importance is hard to overestimate.

An Emotion Markup Language (EML or EmotionML) is defined by the W3C Emotion Incubator Group (EmoXG) as a general-purpose emotion annotation and representation language, which should be usable in a large variety of technological contexts where emotions need to be represented. Emotion-oriented computing (or "affective computing") is gaining importance as interactive technological systems become more sophisticated. Representing the emotional states of a user or the emotional states to be simulated by a user interface requires a suitable representation format.

Meta Content Framework (MCF) was a specification of a format for structuring metadata about web sites and other data. MCF was developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple Computer between 1995 and 1997. When the research project was discontinued, Guha left Apple for Netscape, where he adapted MCF to use XML and created the first version of the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.

SMIL, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things. SMIL allows the presentation of media items such as text, images, video, and audio, as well as links to other SMIL presentations, and files from multiple web servers. SMIL markup is written in XML, and has similarities to HTML.

The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) is a representation format, based on XML, for communicating and storing computational models of biological processes. It is a free and open standard with widespread software support and a community of users and developers. SBML can represent many different classes of biological phenomena, including metabolic networks, cell-signaling pathways, regulatory networks, infectious diseases, and many others. It is the de facto standard for representing computational models in systems biology today.

XBL (XML Binding Language) is an XML-based markup language used to declare the behavior and look of XUL-widgets and XML elements.

VoiceXML (VXML) is the W3C's standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It allows voice applications to be developed and deployed in an analogous way to HTML for visual applications. Just as HTML documents are interpreted by a visual web browser, VoiceXML documents are interpreted by a voice browser. A common architecture is to deploy banks of voice browsers attached to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to allow users to interact with voice applications over the telephone.

The Rich Representation Language, often abbreviated as RRL, is a computer animation language specifically designed to facilitate the interaction of two or more animated characters. The research effort was funded by the European Commission as part of the NECA Project. The NECA (Net Environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) framework within which RRL was developed was not oriented towards the animation of movies, but the creation of intelligent "virtual characters" that interact within a virtual world and hold conversations with emotional content, coupled with suitable facial expressions.