An open and flexible development environment for hypermedia applications

This paper presents a development environment - consisting of a methodology and a set of tools supporting it - that allows one to acquire, manage and present (in a local as well as a network environment) information for use in museum and educational environments. In particular, we consider the development of hypermedia applications that use interactive 3D technologies. The methodology and the relative computer science tools have been proposed, developed, tested and validated through the analysis, the study, the planning and the development of some applications in the fields of the Architectural Heritage and the presentation of Naturalistic specimens. The development environment provides the tools for an effective development of the application components and interactive 3D graphical elements as well as a friendly and simple to use set of tools for developing the applications. Keywords: internet based educational systems, computer assisted learning and instruction, authoring tools and methodology, collaborative knowledge construction using networks and the WWW