Adaptive Multimedia Documents

Abstract

Multimedia documents are of importance in a wide range of application areas, such as education, training, advertising and entertainment. Since multimedia documents may comprise continuous media, such as audio and video, the presentation of those documents may require a significant amount of processing and network resources. The amount of resources available during a presentation depends on the system configuration and the current system load. Hence, it can happen that there are not enough resources to render a multimedia document according to the specification, resulting in a reduced presentation quality, if the presentation is possible at all. To cope with those situations, different versions of the same document can be specified, one for each potential configuration or probable load situation. A better approach is to have only one document that can be adapted to different system configurations and load conditions. To enable this approach, multimedia documents have to be specified flexible so that different presentations can be compiled depending on the resource situation. In this paper, we analyse the adaptivity of multimedia documents and investigate to what extend existing document models support this type of adaptivity.