Communicating and migratable interactive multimedia documents

Abstract

In ubiquitous computing environments, new interactive multimedia applications need to be mobile, device independent, potentially distributed across devices and to leverage existing services in the environment. Multimedia documents, when combined with scripting technologies, can represent complex interactive multimedia applications. However, they are still not appropriate for the creation of migratable, distributed applications in dynamic environments. We present a framework for interactive multimedia documents, which enables the communication of documents with a changing environment, the mobility of documents and the distribution of communicating document components in this environment. This framework uses an original approach, which describes communication processing outside of the document. It is based on: an abstraction model for dynamic network services; the definition of a binding description language that describes how to connect the network processing with the multimedia document processing; and on associated script programming interfaces. An implementation is presented and several examples, demonstrating in particular document mobility and document modularity, are discussed.