Cuypers meets users: implementing a user model architecture for multimedia presentation generation

With the rapid growth of interest in the Internet as a means for accessing multimedia presentations for education, entertainment and commerce, comes a corresponding need for systems to supply automatically generated, personalised presentations. Multimedia is a rich and complex genre of resources and the interrelated effects of content, style and structure ensure that automatic presentation generation is in itself a complicated and challenging task. Integrating a model for user personalisation adds a further layer of complication and ensuring that the requirements of user, supplier and platform are all met is a demanding undertaking. This project investigates the influence of information about a user in the process of generating a multimedia presentation. As a result an architecture taking into account these trade-offs is proposed. To evaluate this combined architecture, a framework has been implemented which adjusts colour choices based on the different influences involved. This paper describes the integration of a user modelling approach within an existing system architecture, discusses some of the issues involved in applying user modelling to multimedia presentation generation and describes the prototype implementation and how it addresses some of these issues.