A MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION TOOLKIT FOR THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

This paper describes the design and implementation of MPRES, a Multime dia Presentation Toolkit for the WWW. The WWW has seen phenomenal grow th over the last couple of years. It has become a vast repository of m ultimedia information that is accessible to virtually anyone having a browser. MPRES is a multimedia presentation system that allows a user to compose and render a presentation consisting of objects referenced by their URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). It uses the concept of dyna mic documents to render on a WWW browser, a sequence of multimedia sce narios, having objects of types such as audio, image, plaintext, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document and animation. MPRES Author, the authoring subsystem, allows the user to interactively test and compose such a presentation, using the Netscape Navigator to collect multimed ia resources from the WWW. A presentation database stores the presenta tions and provides a convenient frontend for accessing them. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.