A platform for transcoding heterogeneous markup documents using ontology-based metadata

As new standards, markup languages, protocols, and client devices continue to emerge, the main problem of existing transcoding systems is the lack of intelligence to cope with the heterogeneous effects, including various transcoding policies, markup documents, device constraints, and server platforms. This study proposes a new approach, called hybrid transcoding, to combine the traditional transcoding technologies based on ontology-based metadata to improve these heterogeneous problems. Additionally, the heterogeneous markup document transcoding (HMDT) platform, based on the proposed hybrid transcoding and web services technologies, is also presented to serve as a transcoding service broker to facilitate interoperability between distributed heterogeneous transcoders. To demonstrate the feasibility of HMDT platform, an application scenario of hybrid transcoding is implemented to convert HTML forms into various client devices.