Visualizing guided tours with W3D

odes in the tour and a directed graph that connects the nodes. Furthermore the guided tour part of OHIF supports document titles, annotations and URLs to the actual documents. The OHIF format is used in other guided tour systems such as Webvise[3] and Arakne[1]. During the development of the W3D prototype the Webvise client was used as a tour editor and our prototype implements full support for the Webvise guided tours. The W3D server is implemented in Python and consists of a CGI interface and a compiler back end. The typical use of the prototype is to start the client and enter an URL to a OHIF file on a Web server. The URL is submitted in a form to the W3D server. The W3D server fetches the OHIF document from the specified URL and parses the document in to a DOM tree. The data in the DOM tree are translated into a Python object model for further computation and finally the VRML source code is emitted and send back to the user's Web browser. The translation from the XML based OHIF