A software engineering approach to multimedia presentation designs

In this paper, we discuss a new authoring system for the stepwise refinement of multimedia presentations. The proposed system is based on data flow and control flow diagrams, with many enhanced notations especially useful for multimedia presentation designs. Presentation designers can use our system to quickly develop a prototype presentation, and refine it step by step toward a final presentation. A multimedia DFD/CFD of multiple levels is to help a presentation designer to analyze the script structure of a presentation. However, it is not powerful enough to define the precise schedule or layout of a presentation. Incorporated with an interactive multimedia Petri net diagramming mechanism, the last level of a presentation window is refined to a Petri net, which describes the temporal behavior of a presentation window. Our interactive multimedia Petri net is a variation of timed Petri net, with the addition of User Transitions and Sync Arc. Since a multimedia presentation is interactive, we introduce the above two objects for participant dependent synchronization. Using our system, a presentation designer is able to analyze his/her presentation script and design the presentation in a systematic manner.