Contact Point:

Dipl.-Inform. Jochen Meyer ( ), Tel. +49 441 9722-185

OFFIS, Germany
  

Technical Contact Point:

Dipl.-Inform. Ansgar Scherp ( )
  

Type of Software:

STABLE PROTOTYPE 
  

Descriptive Keywords:

Multimedia content transformation, multi-channel creation of multimedia content, web service.
  

Potential Use and Applications:

Applications that need to transform (personalized) multimedia content into different multimedia presentation formats.
  

General Description:

With Transformation4U, we propose a web service for the DelosDLMS that provides for a multi-channel authoring of (personalized) multimedia presentations in different presentation formats targeted at different (mobile) end devices. The service bases on the Presentation Format Generators component of the MM4U framework [SB05a+b], which provides application-independent transformation algorithms and transformation rules to bring multimedia content in the internal multimedia content representation model of the framework into the syntax and features of the different concrete presentation formats we find today such as SMIL, SVG, and Flash. Employing the Transformation4U web service and its underlying Presentation Format Generators component allows remote multimedia applications to author (personalized) multimedia content in the internal multimedia content representation model of the MM4U framework and to bring this content over the last mile to the different (mobile) end users’ device settings.
  

Technical Description:

The Transformation4U web service is hosted on a Unix server, provided by the OFFIS Institute for Information Technology in Oldenburg, Germany. A description of the web service is available online from the following web page (this document):

http://power1.offis.uni-oldenburg.de:60062/mm4uapp/t4uservice.html

The Transformation4U web service itself is available from the following address:

http://power1.offis.uni-oldenburg.de:60062/axis/Transformation4U.jws.

To obtain a WSDL description of the web service, type the following information into your web browser:

http://power1.offis.uni-oldenburg.de:60062/axis/Transformation4U.jws?wsdl

To apply the Transformation4U web service, an application must provide the multimedia content in a XML-based document. This XML document will be validated against the MM4U framework’s composition model. This composition model is defined in a DTD that is available online from the following web page:

http://www-is.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~mm4u/Specifications/mm4u.dtd

Note: Currently, only a selected set of the multimedia composition functionality of the MM4U framework are actually provided by the Transformation4U web service. The example documents listed at the end of this document provide a good overview of that functionality.

To transform a multimedia document you can either send the document’s XML description to the web service or specify an URL referring to that document. To specify the targeted output format, you can determine the output format directly when calling the web service. Once, the user profile server of DS-MIRF is provided and integrated into the Transformation4U server, one can also provide a user profile ID instead of directly specifying the output format. In that case, the Transformation4U web service will determine based on the information stated in the given user profile, which output format shall be selected. As a consequence of the description of the web service, Transformation4U will provide four different transformation methods:

1. Transformation by providing a XML document together with the output format.
2. Transformation by providing a URL reference to the document together with a target output format.
3. Transformation by providing a XML document together with a user profile ID.
4. Transformation by providing a URL reference to the document together with a user profile ID.

Sample Client: A sample client has been implemented in Java to demonstrate and to test the Transformation4U web service. The sample client can be downloaded from the following web page: http://power1.offis.uni-oldenburg.de:60062/mm4uapp/t4uservice.html

The client bases on the libraries of the Apache Axis project, which can be found here: http://ws.apache.org/axis/

The sample client consists of the following Java classes:

Transformation4U.java,Transformation4UService.java, Transformation4UServiceLocator.java, Trans­for­ma­tion­­4U­Soap­BindingStub.java, and TestClient.java.

Most of the classes have been automatically generated by the WSDL-to-Java tool that is provided by Apache’s Axis project. The interesting part of the client from an application developer’s point of view is the file TestClient.java. Here, the four variants to call the Transformation4U web service are demonstrated.

Example Documents: For testing purpose and to getting started using the Transformation4U web service, we are currently providing a set of example multimedia documents. These example documents cover different aspects of multimedia content authoring:

• Testing font capabilities:
  http://www-is.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~mm4u/Examples/font.mm4u.xml
• A simple slideshow:
  http://www-is.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~mm4u/Examples/slideshow.mm4u.xml
• A video with subtitles:
  http://www-is.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~mm4u/Examples/video.mm4u.xml
     

Required User Skills:

Programming web services.
  

Pre-Requisites for Installation:

None
  

Conditions of use:

Contact the authors.
  

Additional Information:

Scherp A. and Boll S. 2005. MM4U: a framework for creating personalized multimedia content. In U. Srinivasan and S. Nepal (eds.), Managing Multimedia Semantics. IRM Press. 246-287.
  
Scherp A. and Boll S. 2005. Paving the last mile for multi-channel multimedia presentation generation. In: Y.-P. Phoebe Chen (ed.), Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2005). Melbourne (Australia). Washington: IEEE Computer Society. 190-197.