Introduction of a file-system with integrated scaling capability

For decades, scalable image coding - also referred to as hierarchical-coding - has been an integral part of several standardization activities at JPEG and MPEG. Designed to compensate for slow data-networks, storage-devices or insufficient decoding resources, one may find it surprising, that only very few commercially-available products use this technology today. So why are we not using scalability, even if the advantages sound so convincing? Well, a major disadvantage is certainly the complexity coming with this technology. Often, scalability could solve a technical issue, but workarounds are simply easier to realize. Especially, since each hard-and software would have to implement scalability on its own. To address this issue, we introduce a centralized component within a computers operating system taking care of the scalability. Implemented as a file-system using so-called "parametrized file-requests" we demonstrate a first prototype of such a centralized component, enabling 3rd-party software to use scalability without any additional implementation.