Compiling adaptive diagrams into SVG

Research into adaptive documents has focussed almost exclusively on text and multimedia content. It has largely ignored adaptation of diagrammatic content, treating these as a kind of image. This is unfortunate since charts, maps, plans, networks and other diagrammatic notations are an important, commonly used vehicle for communication. We believe that interactive media and the web requires a new kind of diagram, one that can adapt its content and presentation to suit the viewing context by taking into account the viewing device and the needs of the viewer, and which supports user interaction. It is not reasonable to expect web developers to have to write explicit script to encode adaptive behaviour. High-level diagram authoring tools are required that hide this away from all but the most expert web developer. There are two important design requirements for such an authoring tool. First, it should be general enough to support common kinds of adaptive behaviour on a wide variety of different kinds of diagrams. Second, the resulting adaptive diagrams should be able to be compiled into a reasonably compact representation supported by current or proposed standards. In this paper, we enumerate some commonly found types of diagram adaptation, identify a number of requirements that are necessarily imposed on an adaptive diagram model, compare possible techniques for compiling adaptive diagrams into a form usable by web browsers, and discuss what additional features SVG might have to better support adaptive diagrams.