ABSTRACT
In the framework of the ESPRIT Project 8752-Magic Tour, major emphasis has been devoted to the development of a multimedia authoring system specifically oriented to developing tourism-oriented applications. In particular, Magic Tour is an authoring system for supporting the generation of a wide spectrum of tourism applications based on multimedia and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies. Through the adoption of GIS technologies, new classes of operations based on adjacency, distance, proximity calculus and route optimization are made available to the users of tourism applications, in addition to more traditional multimedia data navigation and presentation features. Consequently, only simple spatial queries that address individual entities are possible with the basic authoring system. The solution adopted for designing the authoring system consists of the extension of an existing authoring system with multimedia capabilities.
