Processing Structured Hypermedia : A Matter of Style

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations

Processing Structured Hypermedia - A Matter of Style

Vliet, J.C. van [Promotor]Eliens, A. [Copromotor

Hypermedia and the semantic web: a research agenda

Until recently, the Semantic Web was little more than a name for the next generation Web infrastructure as envisioned by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Now, with the introduction of XML and RDF, and new developments such as RDF Schema and DAML+OIL, the Semantic Web is rapidly taking shape. In this paper, we first give an overview of the state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology, the key relationships with traditional hypermedia research, and a comprehensive reference list to various sets of literature (Hypertext, Web and Semantic Web). The core of the paper presents a research agenda b

Application-specific constraints for multimedia presentation generation

A multimedia presentation can be viewed as a collection of multimedia items (such as image, text, video and audio), along with detailed information that describes the spatial and temporal placement of the items as part of the presentation. Manual multimedia authoring involves explicitly stating the placement of each media item in the spatial and temporal dimensions. The drawback of this approach is that resulting presentations are hard to adapt to different target platforms, network resources, and user preferences. An approach to solving this problem is to abstract from t

Using Web Services for Accessing and Sharing Multimedia Resources in Distributed Digital Museum

In a digital museum exhibition management system, two major issues need to be concerned. The first is regarding the efficient hypermedia generation for virtual exhibitions. The second is regarding the efficient access of multimedia items in a heterogonous environment where distributed digital museum resource management servers may locate at different institutes. This article presents a research project that incorporate the NCNU and INRIA research effort for developing a Web Services-based distributed digital museum content management framework. We first discuss our design of a multi-styles exhibition management framework using XSL for adaptive hypermedia presentation. Then, an endeavor that applies Web Service Architecture for multimedia data access on both keyword-based and content-based media retrieval scenario has been addressed

Generation of abstract geometric art based on exact aesthetics, gestalt theory and graphic design principles

In this thesis artificial intelligence ideas are applied to the domain of fine arts and especially modern art. First, we take a closer look at avant garde art movements of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. After that, we make an analysis of the knowledge on which this art movement is partly based by considering the fields of aesthetics, gestalt psychology and graphic design. Having formalised general ideas about what a well-formed painting should consist of, we then look at ways of incorporate these ideas in a model for generating a composition. We design a formal framework to which we map the domain concepts. Based on the framework, we make a top-down knowledge decomposition. To demonstrate how our ideas can be applied in a practical situation, we have implemented a prototype system. Theoretically, this system is split up into the front-end part, in which the actual output is generated, and the back-end part, in which artificial intelligence techniques are applied to the actual concepts of composing an artwork. The front-end is partly based on the multimedia generation system called Cuypers, which was developed at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. Cuypers was made to generate dynamic presentations and therefore generates XML, which subsequently is transformed into a desired format (XHTML, TIME, SMIL) using XSLT transformation stylesheets. Our system generates output in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, which is an XML based standard for vector graphics and animation. The back-end part is based on the formal ideas about art described above. It is implemented in Eclipse Prolog. Finally, we discuss the artistic significance of our results. We conclude this thesis by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the conceptual decisions, as well as suggesting directions for future research, including ideas for the evaluation of the generated composition

Creating harmonious and legible colour schemes in the automated generation of multimedia presentations

Due to the growing amount of information on the web, the user specific requirements and different characteristics of output devices, the opportunities for the automatic generation of multimedia presentations grow. The multimedia presentation generator, that resides in a dynamic environment, such as a museum website, where the user requirements, presentation device characteristics, presentation content and the domain characteristics are not known in advance, needs to be able to compose a presentation. With respect to stylistic design, graphic designers can create a template providing stylistic aspects, but as soon as any of the dynamic attributes of the system change this can result in the need for redesign. We argue that with the correct balance between form and function and by using relevant aspects of design theory, the automatic presentation generator can keep harmony and legibility factors in balance. The aim of this work is to demonstrate this approach on the example of automatic colour design with the use of colour theory from Itten and Tufte. By taking required legibility factors into account, harmonious and well balanced colour schemes, adapted to the requirements of the user, the characteristics of the presentation platform, the content's domain and discourse model can be created. We apply our approach to the domain of presentation environments for musea for fine arts

Supporting the tutor in the design and support of adaptive e-learning

The further development and deployment of e-learning faces a number of threats. First, in order to meet the increasing demands of learners, staff have to develop and plan a wide and complex variety of learning activities that, in line with contemporary pedagogical models, adapt to the learners’ individual needs. Second, the deployment of e-learning, and therewith the freedom to design the appropriate kind of activities is bound by strict economical conditions, i.e. the amount of time available to staff to support the learning process. In this thesis two models have been developed and implemented that each address a different need. The first model covers the need to support the design task of staff, the second one the need to support the staff in supervising and giving guidance to students' learning activities. More specifically, the first model alleviates the design task by offering a set of connected design and runtime tools that facilitate adaptive e-learning. The second model alleviates the support task by invoking the knowledge and skills of fellow-students. Both models have been validated in near-real-world task settings

Energy-Efficient Software

The energy consumption of ICT is growing at an unprecedented pace. The main drivers for this growth are the widespread diffusion of mobile devices and the proliferation of datacenters, the most power-hungry IT facilities. In addition, it is predicted that the demand for ICT technologies and services will increase in the coming years. Finding solutions to decrease ICT energy footprint is and will be a top priority for researchers and professionals in the field. As a matter of fact, hardware technology has substantially improved throughout the years: modern ICT devices are definitely more energy efficient than their predecessors, in terms of performance per watt. However, as recent studies show, these improvements are not effectively reducing the growth rate of ICT energy consumption. This suggests that these devices are not used in an energy-efficient way. Hence, we have to look at software. Modern software applications are not designed and implemented with energy efficiency in mind. As hardware became more and more powerful (and cheaper), software developers were not concerned anymore with optimizing resource usage. Rather, they focused on providing additional features, adding layers of abstraction and complexity to their products. This ultimately resulted in bloated, slow software applications that waste hardware resources -- and consequently, energy. In this dissertation, the relationship between software behavior and hardware energy consumption is explored in detail. For this purpose, the abstraction levels of software are traversed upwards, from source code to architectural components. Empirical research methods and evidence-based software engineering approaches serve as a basis. First of all, this dissertation shows the relevance of software over energy consumption. Secondly, it gives examples of best practices and tactics that can be adopted to improve software energy efficiency, or design energy-efficient software from scratch. Finally, this knowledge is synthesized in a conceptual framework that gives the reader an overview of possible strategies for software energy efficiency, along with examples and suggestions for future research