In heterogenous networks like the Internet nearly every day new devices
gain access to it. In most cases the content (resources), in particular
multimedia resources, obtained by these devices need to be adapted
to their specific capabilities. In addition, scalable formats enable
the possibility to retrieve different versions of the same resource
by performing simple manipulations on its bitstream. Due to the fact
that new scalable formats will arise in the future the adaptation
of these multimedia resources shall be performed in an interoperable
way. In this thesis, XML is used to describe the structure of the
bitstream and the resulting XML description is transformed instead
of applying the adaptation directly on the bitstream. Subsequently,
the transformed XML description is used to generate the adapted version
of the bistream. Furthermore, this XML description describes the bitstream
in such generic way which allows resource agnostic adaptation to be
performed. The transformation of the XML description can be conducted
by using different approaches. In this thesis, however, XSLT is used
to perform these transformations. An application using the MPEG-4
visual coding standard for validation and verifcation of this approach
is given.
