Data adaptation is an essential system component in a wide variety of application areas. To date, most applications use ad hoc methods to manage data in response to limited resources and changing system conditions. We present a generic adaptation framework that distills the common elements essential to a broad class of adaptive applications. Our framework provides an abstract data representation and defines a generic set of adaptation operations that directly support multidimensional and multimedia adaptive behavior. We present several application case studies and demonstrate the performance of our framework on an experimental prototype.