| Information services that offer specialized value added multimedia information in fields such as online media are becoming a common place. On the one hand, for providing richer content, these services first fetch different multimedia components, such as text, images, videos and audios, from various sources, and carefully compose them together into one object, by specifying a set of constraints such as temporal (e.g., video in sync with audio), spatial (e.g., image above text), security (e.g., only subscribers can view the video), and fidelity (e.g., x-ray images are presented on high resolution monitors only). That object is presented to the user, and referred to as Composite Multimedia Object (cmo). On the other hand, different users have different Capabilities (e.g., languages), Characteristics (e.g., devices) and Credentials (e.g., subscriptions) (3Cs).; "Multimedia Universal Access" enables a user to access his/her personalized cmo at anytime, anywhere. To create such cmo to suit the different users' 3Cs, there will be an exponential number of possible resulting cmo depending on the number of users' 3Cs. The challenge exists in how to make objects intelligent enough so that they automatically manifest themselves to cater to different users' 3Cs.; This dissertation addresses two research issues (1) developing a model that presents the different cmo constraints and the user 3Cs in one uniform model such that it lends its self for automatic adaptation, in such as way, that helps automatically identifying and resolving mismatches between the cmo constraints and user 3Cs, and (2) integrating the user interaction into the model and identifying and resolving potential deadlocks before the manifestation process.; We develop a new formal model, named Multimedia Color Time Petri net (MMCTPN) within a framework to achieve the Multimedia Universal Access. We then augment the MMCTPN model to include user interaction within the cmo. We implement the cmo using the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). We present the user security policy and the user credentials using the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).; We present an adaptive cmo prototype developed for an emergency management system for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. |
