MM4U - A framework for creating personalized multimedia content

Multimedia content today can be considered as the composition of media elements into an interactive multimedia presentation. Personalization of such multimedia content means that the content reflects the users’s context, their specific background and interest as well as the heterogeneous infrastructure to which the content is delivered and in which it is presented. To achieve personalized multimedia content a manual creation of many different documents for all the different user contexts, however, is not feasible let alone economical. Rather a dynamic process of selecting and assembling personalized multimedia content depending on the user context seems reasonable. Support for such a dynamic creation of personalized multimedia presentations, however, is lacking today. Existing multimedia authoring tools do not support dynamic content creation. Systems that already dynamically assemble personalized content, typically found in the Web, remain text-focused. First research approaches in the field of dynamic generation of personalized multimedia content are limited with regard to their expressiveness of the personalization task and the user features they can personalize to. Whenever the content personalization task is more complex, these systems need to employ additional programming. Consequently, with MM4U (short for ”multimedia for you”), we propose a generic and modular framework to support multimedia content personalization applications in this multimedia software development process. The framework’s components provide generic components for typical tasks of the multimedia content personalization. In turn the development of multimedia applications becomes easier and much more efficient for different users with their different contexts. First sample applications we develop on the basis of our framework are a personalized multimedia picture gallery and a personalized sightseeing tour.