Tayeb Lemlouma and Nabil Layaïda
For the W3C Workshop on Device Independent Authoring Techniques
Nowadays, there is a plethora of exotic electronic devices such as pagers, PDAs, color cellular phones and there is no sign that the diversity of their characteristics will diminish anytime soon. Developing sophisticated solutions and architectures becomes so indispensable to enable the access of the Web content by heterogeneous devices.
The first step of the adaptation process is to start with a content model used in the content authoring. In the Device Independent Authoring Techniques Workshop, we are particularly interested by the new authoring mechanisms and technique that can be used to perform and ameliorate a universal access of the Web content. Adaptation solutions that we try to design encounter usually many problems related the absence of adaptable and flexible content. Ensuring efficient authoring techniques, which should be device independent, will make easier the application of future content adaptations.
Our contribution is directly related to the generation of the content by adaptation using: media adaptation and structural transformation (that includes the use of XSLT). In our approach these techniques are delegated to a third entity (the proxy) placed between clients and content servers. The proxy controls the adaptation process and makes the delivery of adapted content more efficient. The proxy optimizes the effort of original servers related to services customization and tries to use efficiently the network resources.
Here in the following, an abstract of the position paper that we have submitted to the workshop.
In this paper, we propose a general framework for device independent authoring and presentation. Our approach relies on negotiated adaptation and generation techniques. These techniques allow the creation of customized presentations for different clients starting from a single and more abstract content representation. We focus on some key aspects of this framework through the learned lessons from an experimental system called NAC (Negotiation and Adaptation Core) under development in our project. A particular attention is given to the document model, the document transformation and media adaptation process. The role of the proxy in such a framework is also discussed.
This position paper focuses on the content negotiation and adaptation of services in heterogeneous environment and this using the concept of universal profiling. We discuss our vision to achieve an advanced content negotiation. For this, we define a profiling schema that includes the utile description of the entire component that can participate in the final deliverance of services. The defined profiling schema is opened, extensible and doesn't depend to a particular kind of devices, which make it useful in the context of adapted services deliverance.