Multimedia Adaptation using AHA!

Presentation formats used for publishing information on the World Wide Web are constantly evolving. Simultaneously, the range of devices used to access this information is expanding. In education adaptive hypermedia methods and techniques are often used to tailor a presentation to the individual user. Typical adaptation software can only adapt simple presentation formats like HTML (with embedded objects that are not adapted). The evolution in Web technology requires adaptive hypermedia software to keep up, and to provide adaptation for documents in new formats such as SMIL and (X)HTML+SMIL, and to provide adaptation to more than just the user’s knowledge level and learning style but also the properties of the user-interface device and the network connection. This paper shows how the AHA! system can be used to provide adaptive interaction with SMIL documents, and in fact with almost any XML-based format. Adaptation in SMIL and (X)HTML+SMIL using AHA! is currently being used in an assignment for an adaptive hypermedia course being taught at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Demo’s from this assignment are available from the AHA! project website (http://aha.win.tue.nl/).