Personalized Web applications automatically adapted for different clients and user preferences gain more importance. Still, there are barely technologies to compensate the additional effort of creating, maintaining and publishing such Web content. To address this problem, this paper introduces a declarative, componentbased approach for adaptive, dynamic Web documents on the basis of XML-technology. Adaptive Web components on different abstraction levels are defined in order to support effective Web page authoring and generation. Media components encapsulate concrete media assets by describing them with technical metadata. Content units group media components belonging together semantically by declaring their layout in a device-independent way. Finally, hierarchical document components playing a specific semantic role are defined. The hyperlink view for defining typed links is spanned over all component layers. Beside the reuse of both implementation artefacts and higher level concepts, the model also allows to define adaptive behavior of components in a fine-granular way. As a further benefit the support for ubiquitous collaboration via component annotations is introduced. Finally, the stepwise pipeline-based process of document generation is introduced and performance issues are sketched.

m.c. schraefel

We introduce the notion of a live document and we describe our concept of live documents with contextual, data driven information components. The dynamic and interactive features of live documents provide a consistent data source for multimedia presentations targeted to various audiences and multiple platforms. Therefore, they contribute to the solution of key challenges in single sourcing and repurposing. We motivate the use of live documents with sample scenarios from the field of systems documentation. We further discuss how live documents can benefit from an interdisciplinary research approach across the fields of technical communications, systems documentation, and software engineering. Finally, we describe our experiences with prototype implementations of live documents based on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Microsoft Office Automation, respectively.

1.2 Finding things (i): Search and query on the Web...............................................................8