Towards a theory of multimedia metacomputing

摘要

Multimedia metacomputing is a new approach to the management and processing of multimedia data in web-based information systems. It offers high flexibility and openness while shielding the applications from any system internals. Starting with the vision of a completely open and globally distributed multimedia information system, we consider abstraction concepts required, especially transformation independence, and an appropriate semantic model.Thus, the major focus of this paper is on the abstract data and processing model called VirtualMedia,1 which provides a transformation independence framework for multimedia processing. In particular, we describe how transformation requests are represented and processed, exploiting semantic equivalence relations on filter graphs and redundant materialization, finally yielding instantiatable plans for materializing the requested media object(s) at the client.