Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lynda Hardman and Dick Bulterman, CWI, Amsterdam
Truly ubiquitous multimedia delivery will only become feasible when it becomes cost-effective to disseminate information to heterogeneous platforms. We propose two ways of reducing the costs of creating and managing multimedia information. First, we propose semi-automatic generation of hypermedia documents during the authoring process, so that potential end-user platforms can be taken into consideration. Second, the generated document should contain sufficient information in order to be able adapt to the particular delivery platform.
Authoring documents for playback on multiple platforms requires the development of appropriate abstractions from which the multiple versions can be generated automatically.
While an information provider would prefer to create and maintain a single document for all potential delivery platforms, in practice, however, it is not always possible to abstract from the differences among the platforms. For example, the differences in multimedia presentation capabilities and available network bandwidth between mobile smartphones and high-end multimedia high-end workstations is too great to be encapsulated in a single document abstraction. For these cases, the document model should provide facilities for encoding alternatives so that the document can be adapted to the delivery platform.
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