An Integrated Approach for Device Independent Publication of Complex Multimedia Documents

The increasing number of devices for multimedia consumption poses a significant challenge on the device independence of multimedia publication systems. Moreover, media content itself becomes increasingly complex, complicating the creation and management of content in a multichannel context. In this paper, we describe how the XiMPF document model (based on MPEG-21 DID) improves device independence through the integration of descriptive languages for structure, layout, synchronisation and interactivity. Its transparent handling of singular and composed media items greatly improves reusability across platforms. We describe how our publication infrastructure generates content for multiple client devices, and demonstrate the extensiblity of our approach by adding support for the creation of sequential output documents. The publication system is applied to the news site of the leading Belgian broadcaster VRT, generating adapted content for four platforms: PC, TV with set-top box, PDA and SMIL based players.