The MVCE knowledge-based content and service adaptation management framework

The range of content and services on the Internet, the diversity of terminals and the heterogeneity of network technologies to access these services make it a necessity to implement some means to adapt both content and services to meet the needs of the communication environment of the service consumer. An adaptation management framework to support content/service adaptation will take away the complexity of the delivery of compound services from the user and content/service provider. This paper introduces such a context-aware content/service adaptation management framework which uses knowledge-based semantic Web and Web service technologies to facilitate the interoperability between the different technologies and domains involved in content/service adaptation, e.g. the user's context, the content/service and the available adaptation tools. This work, being part of Mobile VCE (MVCE) Ubiquitous Services project, advances the knowledge-based approaches by, firstly, proposing a distributed architecture for such a framework to accelerate its real-world deployment, and secondly, providing mechanisms for adaptation decision making and adaptation tools selection. This paper provides an overview of the framework architecture and outlines the functionalities of its constituent components, i.e. Adaptation Manager and Content Adaptor, as well as the communication mechanisms applied.