Lecture Object¶

A lecture object is an object which describes a lecture: it is basically a XML file with metadata. It contains all the information about title, author, date, video, slides, timing, etc.

The Lecture Object model is a standard proposed to share weblectures between different communities. To have more information about Lecture Object, see the page about the first steps of the project

The lecture object metadata are contained in the file lecture.xml which is inside the lecture object folder and it used by the software.

The process of archiving a lecture is the conversion of camera and slides encoded videos to a structured folder with this template:

LectureObjectName/
    chalkboard/
    images/
    logs/
    media/
    resources/
    slides/
    slides-capture/
    slides-capture-analyzed/
    lecture.xml

chalkboard: if the presentation uses chalkboard instead of slides, this folder will contain also the different chalkboard images.
images: images as support material
logs: used by scripts to write their log
media: encoded and transcoded video files
slides: slides selected by the human operator for the final publishing
slides-capture: 1-per-second screenshot from the slides video
slides-capture-analyzed: resulting slides after the automatic analyzing script

Lecture.xml structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE LECTURE SYSTEM "http://www.wlap.org/dtd/lecture.dtd">
<LECTURE TITLE="title">
    <AUTHOR>author 1</AUTHOR>
    <AUTHOR>author 2</AUTHOR>
    <DATE>2011-04-07</DATE>
    <LANGUAGE>eng</LANGUAGE>
    <DURATION>01:30</DURATION>
    <TIME>09:00:00</TIME>
    <PAR>
        <VIDEO REGION="speaker-face">
            <SWITCH>
                <REF SRC="media/master.ext" TYPE="video/flash" WIDTH="240" HEIGHT="160" AUDIO="Yes" VIDEO="Yes" AVERAGERATE="" ADAPTIVE="No"/>
            </SWITCH>
        </VIDEO>
        <CHAPTERS> <!-- this is an option part, it depends on your specific lecture -->
            <CHAPTER TITLE="Introduction and Presentation" BEGIN="00:00:00" AUTHOR="Firstname Surname"/>
            <CHAPTER TITLE="Argument" BEGIN="00:25:10"/>
        </CHAPTERS> <!-- enf of option part -->
        <SEQ TITLE="Sequence of slides" REGION="slide">
            <SLIDE SRC="slides/20110719145833.png" BEGIN="00:00:00" TYPE="image/png" REGION="slide" TITLE="00:00:00 slide"/>
            <SLIDE SRC="slides/20110719145843.png" BEGIN="00:00:10" TYPE="image/png" REGION="slide" TITLE="00:00:10 slide"/>
            <SLIDE SRC="slides/20110719145915.png" BEGIN="00:00:42" TYPE="image/png" REGION="slide" TITLE="00:00:42 slide"/>
            <SLIDE SRC="slides/20110719145940.png" BEGIN="00:01:07" TYPE="image/png" REGION="slide" TITLE="00:01:07 slide"/>
        </SEQ>
    </PAR>
</LECTURE>

Lecture Object folder¶

We call Lecture Object folder the directory where all the files related to a lecture are contained. The naming convention of this directory is important because it is used by the entire system and has to be unique. You can set and change part of it in the configuration file. Currently, at CERN, we are using YYYYMMDD-cernmachinename-HHMMSS

Description:

YYYYMMDD: year, month, day of lecture creation;
cern: convention used in cern. Change this as you prefer;
machinename: the name of the machine doing some process on it. For example, pctrans01;
HHMMSS: time of lecture creation.

The mix of these elements is good choice for unique folder names.

Example of lecture object folder content (displayed on a Windows machine):

Micala v0.4 documentation

Lecture Object

Lecture Object¶

Lecture Object folder¶