Authoring MHEG Presentations with GLASS-Studio

Distributed multimedia applications recently gain a large attraction to the multimedia industry. The MHEG (Multimedia Hypermedia Expert Group) is developing an open international standard for the exchange of multime dia presentations and their work has become quite ad vanced now. This paper describes the MHEG standard and its implementation in the GLASS project and presents an open authoring environment for distributed multime dia applications in the MHEG context. Our GLASS-Stu dio is an authoring environment employing the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technique. The environment provides abstractions from the author ing domain and the underlying technical infrastructure of the GLASS system. GLASS-Studio supports rapid-proto typing and simulation capabilities, enabling an incremen tal and iterative design process. Real-world metaphors like direct manipulation and drag&drop provide an easy- to-learn user interface. We present a flexible cooperation scheme based on the blackboard metaphor and show how guidance and assistance for the author can be incorporat ed. Finally we give an overview of the implementation concepts of GLASS-Studio.