XML saves the day: Porting a Rich-Media Collection to a Mobile Platform in Three Weeks Flat

Since 2001, we develop specifications and tools for creating and deploying rich-media content. Our GLIFOS Markup Language (GML) is an XML-based specification that separates the content (videos, transcriptions, slides) from the rendering of the rich-media player. Using our tools, the University Francisco Marroqun (UFM, Guatemala) has created and hosts an online library of over 300 hours of enriched streaming video (www.newmedia.ufm.edu) to support web-based and classroom teaching. GML is technology, platform, and format independent. We claim that these qualities guarantee content portability to diverse platforms in use today, as well as to those that will arise in the future. We had backed this claim by proving how simple it is to port GML to the leading platforms (e.g., Real Player and Windows Media Player), however, we had yet to port it to a truly new platform---that is, one that arose after the design of our XML specification and our content creation tools. This paper describes our XML specification and content creation tools, and gives a week by week description of our experience porting the UFM's collection to the new PDA models. Such mobile devices are able to stream video through their Wi-Fi connection, without clogging their CPUs or draining their batteries. Finally, we discuss how this experience has validated the importance of XML for digital preservation and our tools' ability (so far) for porting content to new platforms. Keywords Rich-media, digital preservation, XML/XSLT, mobile learning