Keep it small and smart

The production of interactive multimedia content is in most cases an expensive task in terms of time and cost. It must hence be the goal to optimize the production by exploiting the reusability of interactive multimedia elements. Reusability can be triggered by a combination of reusable multimedia components, together with the appropriate use of metadata to control the components as well as their combination. In this article, we discuss reusability and adaptability aspects of interactive multimedia content in web-based learning systems. In contrast to existing approaches, we extend a component-based architecture to build up interactive multimedia visualization units by the use of metadata for reusability and customizability issues.