STAMP: Adaptable Templates for Synchronized Multimedia Presentations Ioan Marius Bilasco Laboratoire LSR IMAG BP. 72 38402 Saint Martin d’Hères Cedex FRANCE +33 4 76 82 72 11 bilasco@imag.fr Jérôme Gensel Laboratoire LSR IMAG BP. 72 38402 Saint Martin d’Hères Cedex FRANCE +33 4 76 82 72 80 gensel@imag.fr Marlène Villanova-Oliver Laboratoire LSR IMAG BP. 72 38402 Saint Martin d’Hères Cedex FRANCE +33 4 76 82 72 80 villanov@imag.fr Abstract This paper addresses the adaptation of dynamic and synchronized multimedia presentations built by querying XML compatible data sources. We provide WIS designers with facilities for describing presentations whose content is not known at design time in terms of quantity, but only after the execution of queries. Our approach relies on the definition of a template. A template consists of a model that aims at automatically adapting the multimedia content of a presentation to both the user’s profile and the characteristics of her/his access device. We show here how a template is built and how adaptations of the presentation are performed when the quantity of information and/or the material capabilities of the access devices (e.g. display size), do not match the template’s spatiotemporal specifications. 1. Introduction Nowadays, documents available on the Internet include data of several media types (text, 2D/3D graphics, video, audio, etc.) which are temporally and spatially combined in so-called synchronized multimedia presentations. Exploited in Web-based Information Systems (WIS) [4] as an access interface to their functionalities (delivering, querying, modifying, etc. information), these presentations are moreover considered as dynamic since they are built at run time using multimedia contents extracted from databases. To face the increasing diversity of both users and access devices (workstation, laptop, PDA, etc.); WIS designers should be provided with tools for specifying dynamic and synchronized multimedia presentations adapted to the diffusion context. In this context, the global objective of our work is to offer a platform (called KIWIS [7]) for the design and the generation of adaptable WIS. The adaptations are both user and device oriented and concern the content, the functionalities as well as the presentation of information. In [7], we have addressed the issue of adapting the content and functionalities of a WIS to its users. One aim of KIWIS is to allow the design of dynamic and synchronized multimedia presentations which will be, at delivering time, automatically adapted to both the user’s profile (interest, knowledge, preferences, etc.) and the device characteristics (screen size, memory capacity, etc.). In this paper, we focus on the adaptation of dynamic and synchronized multimedia presentations built by querying semi-structured and XML compatible data. We assume that the content retrieved by the query is adapted to the user’s interest and preferences. We specially aim at providing WIS designers with facilities for describing presentations whose quantity of information is not known at design time (but only after the execution of queries). This unknown set of information encompasses multimedia data, which have to be combined in space and time, some requiring a minimum surface to be displayed (except for audio data) and/or a minimum time interval in order to be played (i.e. continuous multimedia data such as video and audio). Designing presentations of multimedia data obtained from queries implies to anticipate problems related to their spatiotemporal organization. One issue we address here is the adaptation of the data spatiotemporal organization inside the available displaying surface which differs according to the device used (workstation, laptop, mobile devices, etc.). Our approach relies on the construction of a template which gives the specifications of a presentation model and which is automatically adapted at instantiation time (i.e.