A Framework for Developing Pervasive Cross-Media Applications based on Physical Hypermedia and Active Components

We present a framework that supports the development of pervasive cross-media applications through a clean separation of interaction design and application programming. The approach is based on a novel concept of active components that provides a lightweight mechanism for linking physical and digital entities to services. We show how the development of cross-media applications can be simplified by adopting an authoring rather than a programming approach and how we achieved this by integrating the active component concept into an extensible hypermedia server.