Progressive refinement: more than a means to overcome limited bandwidth

Progressive refinement is commonly understood as a means to solve problems imposed by limited system resources. In this publication, we apply this technology as a novel approach for information presentation and device adaptation. The progressive refinement is able to handle different kinds of data and consists of innovative ideas to overcome the multiple issues imposed by large data volumes. The key feature is the mature use of multiple incremental previews to the data. This leads to a temporal deskew of the information to be presented and provides a causal flow in terms of a tour-through-the-data. Such a presentation is scalable leading to a significantly simplified adaptation to the available resources, short response times, and reduced visual clutter. Due to its rather beneficial properties and feedback we received from first implementations, we state that there is high potential of progressive refinement far beyond its currently addressed application context.