In the convergence of information and entertainment there is a conflict between the consumer's expectation of fast access to high quality multimedia content through narrow bandwidth channels versus the size of this content. During the retrieval and information presentation of a multimedia application there are two problems that have to be solved: the limited bandwidth during transmission of the retrieved multimedia content and the limited memory for temporary caching. In this paper we propose an approach for latency optimization in information browsing applications. We proposed a method for flattening hierarchically linked documents in a manner convenient for network transport over slow channels to minimize browsing latency. Flattening of the hierarchy involves linearization, compression and bundling of the document nodes. After the transfer, the compressed hierarchy is stored on a local device where it can be partly unbundled to fit the caching limits at the local site while giving the user availability to the content.

Date Published: 5 October 1998
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 3527, Multimedia Storage and Archiving Systems III, (5 October 1998); doi: 10.1117/12.325830

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3527:
Multimedia Storage and Archiving Systems III
C.-C. Jay Kuo; Shih-Fu Chang; Sethuraman Panchanathan, Editor(s)