The acceptance and utility of a broad range of application systems
is substantially affected by their limited ability to present information in
an effective and appealing way to human users. Rapid progress
in the development of multimedia technology promises more
efficient forms of machine/man communication. However, multimedia
presentation design is not just merging output fragments, but requires
a fine grained coordination of communication media and modalities.
This may even become a harder and more complex task than solving the
application problem. Furthermore, in the vast majority of non-trivial
applications the information needs will vary from user to user and
from situation to situation.
Consequently, a presentation system should be able to
flexibly generate various presentations for one and the same
information content in order to meet individual requirements of users
and situations, resource limitations of the computing system, and so forth.
As the need for high presentation flexibility grows, the ``manual'' authoring and preparation of presentations becomes less and less feasible. Starting from this observation, the development of mechanisms for the automated generation of multimedia presentations has become a shared goal across many disciplines. To ensure that the generated presentations are understandable and effective, these mechanisms need to be intelligent in the sense that they are able to make appropriated design decisions based on presentation- and contextual knowledge, and to manage the various interdependencies between choices.