| dc.description.abstract | Digital Signage Networks (DSN) is a continious emerging digital advertisment medium. Display devices, typically large format plasma or LCD screens, are used to provide rich multimedia advertisments in shops, buses, at airports and other public premises. Such networks have turned out to gain significant cost-effective advantages over traditional printed signage by eliminating the need for manual distribution. Animated graphics, audio and video effects makes a DSN highly suitable to attract the customers attraction. Content typically distributed by a DSN is text, graphics, video and audio composited in multimedia presentations presented to the screen in a loop. The presentations are traditionally assembeled with existing multimedia tools and formats like Adobe Flash and Micorosft PowerPoint, or they simply consist of plain images or video streams. The presentations are distributed and controlled by software systems operating in a networked environment of servers and players. Most modern slideshow formats are based on proprietary and binary fileformats making server-side and data-driven generation of content difficult. The widespread vector and animation format for web Adobe, former Macromedia, Flash is a compressed and uneditable file format restricted by severe licensing limitations. Similar limitations are associated with the Microsoft proprietary PowerPoint format. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a W3C standard aimed at expressing two dimensional vector graphics in pure XML. The standard can be used to express content, spatial and temporal relationships between multimedia objects. As SVG scales well to various screen resolutions and aspect ratios, it represents a powerful tool for representing multimedia presentations in a DSN. Most programming languages and server platforms includes extensive XML support, hence we can design a web centric DSN suitable for data-driven and dynamic multimedia presentations by utilizing SVG as a presentation format. The presentations would be editable and accessable throughout the distribution chain with such an approach, leaving the operator with a flexible and modular design principle yielding advantages at both server- and client side. Content can be generated with the use of layout templates or static uploaded artistic work. Referring to the volunteer organization The Student Society in Trondheim (Samfundet) as a reference organization real work-flows, data structures and organizational aspects are analyzed to approach the design of a SVG-based DSN. Through exploiting existing datastructures and content management strategies it appears that such systems introduces a powerful advertising tool in oragnizations with limited financial assets and existing data backbones. The main obstacle with SVG remains to find a rendering engine capable of displaying SVG documents with animation in a straight-forward and reliable way. Areas of SVG application seems focused on plugin- or native rendering support for web browsers. Nevertheless, a lot of effort is put into creating both commercial and open-source rendering tools. The future for SVG is looking bright if it is possible to overcoming these difficulties | nb_NO |
