A visual authoring environment for prototyping multimedia presentations

In this paper we describe an authoring environment which allows the author to set up and test a complex multimedia presentation by defining the synchronization relationships among media. The main component of the authoring environment is a visual editor based on a graph notation, in which the nodes are media objects involved in a multimedia presentation, and the edges are the synchronization relations between them. Several external representations can be generated: a timeline-based representation highlighting media sequencing, and an XML-based description suitable for further processing. An execution simulator helps the author to check the presentation behavior before delivery.