The role of parametrization in the multimedia authoring process

The development of multimedia presentations has become increasingly popular among professionals of different areas such as designers, publishers, executives, etc. A great deal of authoring systems are mostly focused on the final product: the presentation, providing many tools to help in its elaboration. This targeting causes most of the systems, to a certain extend, to leave behind the authoring process and, therefore, the author himself, with no adequate support for the design of his/her presentation, rendering the authoring task harder if not complicated at least. This problem is even more acute knowing that most users of authoring tools are professionals from areas such as the arts, film industry, education, medicine, etc., with little or no experience in programming. It is this lack of concern with authors and the authoring process that has led us to develop a new authoring paradigm totally focused on the author. Many aspects of the authoring and design process have been studied. A new phase has been identified, namely, the presentation parametrization.