The Dynamic Generation of User-Customized Multimedia Presentations

The rapid growth of online digital information over the last decade has made it difficult for a typical user to find and read information [13]. One way to address the problem of information overload is to tailor that information to specific user interests, needs and knowledge base. If there is an approach that responds to individual information requests with an original, dynamically built story, several problems are solved. First, in today’s Web service industry, information presentations and collections of data are static and having limited multi-modal presentations. Critically, there is no capability to dynamically adapt an integrated presentation of information to a user. Second, most of current web search engines deliver a huge amount of hyperlinks. Although this helps improve accuracy (recall), an end user has a trouble deciding which results are what he/she wants. Finally, most web services do not instantiate and customized (for an individual user) “generic” stories. Even though the accuracy of results in terms of precision and recall may be acceptable, the results might not be relevant to a user’s intention(s). The proposed system will create story structures that can be dynamically instantiated for different user requests from various multi-modal elements. In addition, the proposed system focuses on quality of the results not quantity of results. Furthermore, the system leverages information so that a user will read an appropriate level of story depending upon the user’s intention level ranging from general to specific. For example, a user might impress the USC football game, but the user has very little knowledge of the USC football team. The user then wants to read very general information instead of specific information regarding the team. When the user requests a general level of the USC football team, the system will deliver a customized (in this case, a general story) dynamically generated multi-modal story. In order to convey the nature of the information presentation, we propose to define and develop the precise nature of the dynamic generation of user-customized multimedia presentations that will draw upon visual techniques [3, 5], presentation constraints [1, 16], a content query formulation, a story assembly and a structured rule-based decision process. To determine a user’s intention and goal, a general knowledge-based process will be used. A key to the successful use of story types is the ability to relate and connect the user requests to the Content Database. An ontology [4, 7, 9] is essential for capturing the key concepts and relationships in an application domain. For our purposes, we are interested in sports domain dependent ontologies [10,11]. Metadata descriptions will connect a modified user request (by using domain ontology) to the Content Database for retrieving proper content elements.