Proteus is a presentation specification system for structured documents. It provides a uniform specification language for all media and also supports synchronized multiple presentations, allowing the user to view the same document in several styles simultaneously even while the document is being edited. Technology like that provided by Proteus is critical if document interlingua are to be widely adopted.
Research on Proteus is also relevant to intelligent software systems. It provides a higher-level model of presentation that may be more appropriate for reasoning about the presentation of complex documents. Also, Proteus's uniform treatment of all media is based on a formal model of media that may find direct application in intelligent systems.