Specification of multimedia composition and a visual programming environment

Multimedia refers to the composition of multiple monomedia which should be synchronized temporally and spatially. Over the past few years, some trials to describe the composition and synchronization have been made in a variety of applications and these descriptions have been used as frameworks in their applications. Although conventional works have succeeded in describing the synchronizations well, we indicate that they do not deal with the interactivity required in Interactive Multimedia Applications(IMA) like coursewares and hypermedia systems. In this paper, we propose a new specification method based on Milner’s Calculus of Communicating Systems(CCS) to cope with the interactivity. For showing the effectiveness of the specification, we design and implement a visual programming environment based on the specification mechanism, and propose a simple courseware as a programming example. Our approach has implications that the new specification mechanism can be adapted as a framework in various interactive applications and the visual programming environment acquires the benefits that it can handle user interactions and synchronizations with only visual expressions while additional texts for control commands should be augmented in conventional works.