Dynamic creation of multimedia Web views on heterogeneous information sources

Integration of the World Wide Web and other information sources is strongly required in the recent advanced application environments. Although information sources contain various types of data objects, the volume of multimedia objects has been increasing drastically. The paper proposes a multimedia integration scheme using SMIL in a mediator based integration system. The scheme achieves dynamic creation of various Web views combining multimedia objects stored in heterogeneous information sources such as the Web, structured documents, and databases. A key point is to utilize SMIL as a framework for dynamic multimedia integration. Since there already exist some players for SMIL documents, dynamic integration results including multimedia objects can be rendered in such players, without special-purpose ones, and are ready to be broadly distributed. The main contributions of the paper are as follows. (1) We propose a dynamic, SMIL-based multimedia integration scheme. This scheme utilizes an extended relational data model named WebNR/SD. (2) We report on implementation of the proposed scheme. We have already implemented the first prototype system which realizes integration of heterogeneous information sources including multimedia objects. Actually, it can construct SMIL-based multimedia views dynamically. This shows the practical significance of our scheme.