Abstract
We present an Internet tool called WEBCAP that can schedule the retrieval of multimedia web documents in time while considering the workload on the servers and networks. Lately, many web applications (such as the weather news and financial/stock market) depend heavily on the periodical refreshes of their web documents, so that these web documents can offer their users the latest complete information. The frequency of refreshing multimedia web documents places a heavy burden on the server and network resources; moreover, the updated web documents may encounter inordinate delays, which make it difficult to retrieve web documents in time. The WEBCAP is to be embedded within an Internet browser, which then allows the users to find out if the refreshing of a multimedia web document will be received in time. A multimedia web document is modeled as a 4 level hierarchy (object, operation, timing, and precedence) within WEBCAP, where each successive level (graph) offers a fine-grain representation. All graph transformations (object - > operation - > timing - > precedence) are performed automatically within WEBCAP, and then WEBCAP applies the Bellman Ford's algorithm on the precedence graph to schedule all operations (fetch, transmit, process, and render) while satisfying the in time retrieval and all resources constraints.