Visual programming abstractions for interactive multimedia presentation authoring

Various multimedia authoring environments have been developed, resulting in a variety of approaches as to how such presentations are structured and authored. Implicit in these systems is a data model for composing multimedia objects and a user interface model for the authoring activity. Making these models explicit is one goal of this work, since it will lead to the design of easier-to-use and more powerful tools. The authors distinguish the structure of the multimedia objects being composed and the different presentation states that the viewer experiences. The latter is what the author is most concerned with; the former is what most tools allow the author to directly manipulate. The authors illustrate these ideas with examples of multimedia authoring tools that they have developed, and suggest several directions for improvement