A presentation agent for distributed multimedia information systems.

Distributed multimedia information systems aim to improve the way people exchange information by supporting a wider variety of media types. These media types include the traditional static media like text, graphics and images as well as the continuous media types like audio and video. Integrating these different types of media within computer based communication systems is no easy task. Indeed, the successful realization of multimedia information systems will depend on the ability of these systems to overcome the problems associated with information integration. There are two types of integration involved in multimedia information systems: spatial integration and temporal integration. This thesis addresses the problem of multimedia information integration; in particular temporal integration. Temporal integration deals with the inter-media and intra-media synchronization of multimedia information. In distributed multimedia information systems, synchronization is compounded by the presence of a computer communication network. Because most computer communication networks are asynchronous communication networks, these networks are not well suited for ensuring constant data delivery rates for continuous media. A remote multimedia presentation agent is designed to handle the synchronization of multimedia information from distributed sources. This remote multimedia presentation agent uses a multimedia document as the information interchange vehicle of the distributed multimedia information system. The remote multimedia presentation agent uses the progressive document retrieval strategy and dynamic quality of service management to help overcome the problems involved in the synchronized retrieval of multimedia information