Spatial reasoning about multimedia document for a profile based adaptation: Combining distances, directions and topologies

The continuous evolution of smart devices has led to serious limitations in multimedia applications. The multimedia graphic design and animation and the increased use of rich and complex multimedia content on the web or other media have all created a need to diversify the accessibility of the content. Therefore several techniques are used today to design a universally accessible content. The main techniques that are still used to maintain accessibility is to create two parallel streams of design and development of the same content. Thus, the continuous evolution will certainly lead to create other streams. For this, the automatic reasoning on multimedia to allow a computer to modify the design according to different variables, devices capabilities, user status and context to provide personalized adapted content. In this paper, we propose an abstract document model called XMS short for XML Multimedia Specification; it describes the composition of an original multimedia document and can be extended to any document type. We present how we may use spatial information present in this document to adapt and modify the original document. We mainly focus on the spatial aspect of a web document, a combination of RCC8, qualitative distances, and directions are used to describe the layout of a set of objects. The level of granularity of the definition of the objects defines the level of details that will be processed by our PROLOG based inference system, simplified versions of algorithms from the inference system and how it works on the spatial dimension of the document are shown. In the end samples of how spatial relations manipulation algorithms work are illustrated.