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Information resources can be viewed as being composed of media objects. In the proposal, these media objects shall have instance specific methods for manipulating the internals for display, compression, caching etc. We shall develop a framework of generic protocols for manipulating these instance specific methods so that the information resources make the most of limited bandwidth and display capabilities, building on Java and the WWW.
As an example of such a generic protocol, imagine the case where a video object is to be displayed over a radio link. Initially, a meta object containing a retrieval script is transferred to the client, which then determines the available bandwidth from metrics kept in the environment. Determining that the bandwidth is low, it can either remotely invoke the compression method on the server object to increase the degree of compression (where the actual type of compression is hidden behind the exported compressed interface), or can instruct the object to transform itself into a smaller object such as a still storyboard, before retrieving it. In this form of protocol the specific type of object need not be known (audio or video or any other media object can be treated in the same way), and one can apply this sort of protocol to automatic cache update, incremental updates and in conference management (M. Handley, I. Wakeman and J. Crowcroft, 1995).
Mark Handley, Ian Wakeman and Jon Crowcroft (1995). Conference Control Channel Protocol - A scalable base for building Conference Control Applications. Proceedings ACM SIGCOMM95, pp. 275-287.
Since ordinary programmers are not usually aware of how best to program for the network, and in many cases, authors will be sophisticated in neither network programming nor programming in general, we shall examine how best to present the developed protocols to the programmers and authors of the information resources, so that the multimedia objects they compose use the available technology efficiently. We intend to enhance an existing authoring suite to utilize objects developed within the project and to enable the user to understand how the information resources react to varying network and display environments.