![](../../images/rlinks.gif) |
Overview |
![](../../images/rrechts.gif) |
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. This is achieved by realizing several abstraction concepts like
device independence, location transparency, execution transparency, and data
independence. However, format independence as an important aspect of data
independence is well known to be fairly hard to realize, because it tends to
reduce performance massively and, additionally, may lead to unexpected data
loss.
To solve these problems, we introduce an advanced abstraction
concept called transformation independence, which includes all concepts
mentioned above, but adds some more concepts suitable for the metacomputing
approach:
- a flexible materialization management,
- abstract, freely combinable media filters as the basic
operators for metacomputing, and
- the concept of transformation requests, which express
specific application semantics.
In the VirtualMedia project a formal model for
specifying complex media operations as transformation requests and for
processing and optimizing such requests is being developed.
|