The application of this easy to use, stable, coherent methodology and associated tool suite significantly enhances productivity in application development, achieving considerable savings in both time and money. This approach overcomes many of the problems associated with the use of conventional authoring systems, such as primitive level information representations and inconsistencies in the organisation and display of content. It facilitates the complete design of multimedia applications while allowing developers to keep track of original designs in a structured format. Compatability with relational databases is also an important feature, allowing database techniques to be used to automatically install large amounts of data. This is particularly important in archiving applications where conventional authoring systems require the manual establishment of a multitude of links, raising questions regarding time requirements and practical feasibility.
Several tools support the methodology at the highest level.
The schema editor checks the formal correctness of the designed application, and the instance editor checks data consistency with respect to the defined schema. The instance editor also facilitates the coherent tracking of all data within the application and the generation of automatic links between entities. The use of a screen editor and mapper allows users to maintain coherence between the conceptual schema and representation schema. Moreover, the conceptual design was found to be completely re-usable for other past artists, only the content needed to be reloaded. The tool suite is currently being used by EDS Italia for the design and development of hypermedia museum catalogues.