Synchronizing the presentation of multimedia objects

The presentation of multimedia objects requires simultaneous and/or sequential presentation of several representation types (text, graphics, images, audio and video sequences). Therefore the presentation has to be structured and the temporal relations of different actions have to be described. The temporal relations are realized by applying synchronization mechanisms. In this paper a general synchronization model for the description of presentation sequences of multimedia objects is introduced. This model is visualized by Petri nets and examples are presented; it is also applied to the Open Document Architecture (ODA) standard, and ODA extensions are proposed to integrate temporal relationships into ODA.