Elastic Time Computation for Hypermedia Documents

This paper presents a new elastic time algorithm for adjusting hypermedia document presentation in order to avoid temporal inconsistencies. The algorithm explores the flexibility offered by some hypermedia models in the definition of media object duration, and uses this flexibility for choosing the objects to be stretched or shrunk in such a way that the best possible quality of presentation is obtained. Our proposal is based on the "out-of-kilter" method for minimum-cost flow problems, and it seems to offer more flexibility to model real applications in comparison with other previous proposals based on the Simplex method.