more crucial problems related to the used mobile de-
vices. First, the battery life cycles where partially re-
ally short. Many of the used batteries were dead at the
end of the season. And second, the staff who handed
out the devices has occasionally broken some of the
power connectors, when plugging them into the slide-
on receptacles. Sometimes, even the hardware reset
buttons were pushed through and hence those devices
had to be repaired.
CONCLUSION A Web-based and multimedia-
enriched guidance system has been introduced that
customizes both content and its presentation to the
current usage context. Content may include differ-
ent coding and presentation formats like video, audio,
image, and marked-up text, and can be managed by
the means of a Web-based content management sys-
tem. Presentations are based on standard HTML doc-
uments for images and texts, and on custom and com-
monly pre-installed video players for video and au-
dio streams. The usage context plays a central role in
the whole adaptation process. It spans a number of
different dimensions, including the user profile, the
consumer device capabilities, the network capabili-
ties, the location, and the time of content consump-
tion.
The presented guidance system was introduced
and evaluated in a local outdoor theme park in 2005,
and was available to visitors of this park over the
whole operating year. Statistical evaluations have
shown that such a multimedia-enriched guide is rather
a high-end solution for some visitors, who want to
consume more content than provided by commonly
available catalogues.
REFERENCES
Abowd, G. D., Atkeson, C. G., Hong, J., Long, S., Kooper,
R., and Pinkerton, M. (1997). Cyberguide: A Mo-
bile Context-aware Tour Guide. Wireless Networks,
3(5):421–433.
Bormans, J. and Hill, K. (2002). MPEG-21 Overview v.5.
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11/N5231.
Bra, P. D. and Calvi, L. (1998). AHA! An Open Adaptive
Hypermedia Architecture. The New Review of Hyper-
media and Multimedia, 4:115–140.
Brusilovsky, P. (1996). Methods and Techniques of Adap-
tive Hypermedia. User Modeling and User-Adapted
Interaction, 6(2-3):87–129.
Bulterman, D., Grassel, G., Jansen, J., Koivisto, A.,
Layaïda, N., Michel, T., Mullender, S., and Zucker,
D. (2005). Synchronized Multimedia Integration Lan-
guage (SMIL 2.1). W3C Recommendation.
Devillers, S., Timmerer, C., Heuer, J., and Hellwagner, H.
(2005). Bitstream Syntax Description-Based Adap-
tation in Streaming and Constrained Environments.
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Special Issue on
MPEG-21, 7(3):463–470.
Klyne, G., Reynolds, F., Woodrow, C., Ohto, H., Hjelm, J.,
Butler, M. H., and Tran, L. (2004). Composite Capa-
bility/Preferences Profile (CC/PP): Structure and Vo-
cabularies 1.0. W3C Recommendation.
Korva, J., Plomp, J., Määttä, P., and Metso, M. (2001). On-
line Service Adaptation for Mobile and Fixed Termi-
nal Devices. In IEEE 2nd International Conference on
Mobile Data Management (MDM) 2001, pages 252–
259, Hong Kong, China.
Kropfberger, M. and Hellwagner, H. (2005). Combin-
ing Stream Switching with Fine-grained Intra-stream
Adaptation for Adaptive Video Streaming. In IEEE
7th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal
Processing (MMSP) 2005, pages 373–376, Shanghai,
China.
Kropfberger, M. and Schojer, P. (2003). ViTooKi - The
Video ToolKit. Open source project at Source-
Forge.net.
http://ViTooKi.sourceforge.net
.
Krösche, J., Baldzer, J., and Boll, S. (2004). MobiDENK -
Mobile Multimedia in Monument Conservation. IEEE
MultiMedia, 11(2):72–77.
Lemlouma, T. and Layada, N. (2003). SMIL Content Adap-
tation for Embedded Devices. In SMIL Europe 2003,
Paris, France.
Lemlouma, T. and Layada, N. (2004). Context-Aware
Adaptation for Mobile Devices. In IEEE 5th In-
ternational Conference on Mobile Data Management
(MDM) 2004, pages 106–111, Berkeley, USA.
Minimundus GmbH (2006). Die kleine Welt am
Wörthersee.
http://www.minimundus.at
.
Open Mobile Alliance (2006). User Agent Profile -
Approved Version 2.0. OMA-TS-UAProf-V2_0-
20060206-A.
Santner, M., Tusch, R., Kropfberger, M., Böszörmenyi, L.,
and Hellwagner, H. (2006). Ein Ortserkennungssys-
tem für mobile Touristenführer. In DACH Mobility
2006, pages 84–98, Ottobrunn, Germany.
Scherp, A. and Boll, S. (2005). Managing Multimedia Se-
mantics, chapter 11: MM4U: A Framework for Creat-
ing Personalized Multimedia Content, pages 246–287.
Idea Group Inc.
Schojer, P., Böszörmenyi, L., Hellwagner, H., Penz, B.,
and Podlipnig, S. (2003). Architecture of a Quality-
based Intelligent Proxy (QBIX) for MPEG-4 Videos.
In ACM 12th International World Wide Web Confer-
ence, pages 394–402, Budapest, Hungary.
Timmerer, C. and Hellwagner, H. (2005). Interoperable
Adaptive Multimedia Communication. IEEE Multi-
media Magazine, 12(1):74–79.
Vetro, A. and Timmerer, C. (2005). Digital Item Adapta-
tion: Overview of Standardization and Research Ac-
tivities. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 7(3):418–
426.
Vetro, A., Timmerer, C., and Devillers, S. (2006). The
MPEG-21 Book, chapter 7: Digital Item Adapation
- Tools for Universal Multimedia Access, pages 243–
280. John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
90