The deployment of information appliances is predicted to exceed that of personal computers in the next few years. However, due to the wide range of communication, processing, storage and display capabilities of information appliances, the multimedia content on the Internet needs to be adapted before it can be efficiently delivered to these devices. We present content adaptation framework (CAF), a general framework for customizing Internet content for diverse client devices. The system first analyzes the content to be customized. Next, a variety of transcoders generate multi-resolution, multimodal versions of the content. The transcoded versions of the multimedia content are represented in a novel multi-modal, multi-resolution representation hierarchy called the InfoPyramid. Finally, a selection module uses an extended rate-distortion framework to pick the best content versions from the InfoPyramid while meeting the client device characteristics and resources. The content adaptation system can be deployed at various nodes in the Internet topology, such as at the server, at the client device or at an intermediate proxy. We present examples of proxy and server content adaptation systems based on CAF. Based on the content adaptation framework, we present a description scheme for multimedia and Internet content. This description scheme enables universal access to content. It has been proposed to various standards bodies.
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