A unified data model and system support for the context-aware access to multimedia content.
Pedro Carvalho, Maria Teresa Andrade, Claudio Alberti, Helder Castro, Catalin Calistru, Philippe de Cuetos · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2007
Context-aware consumption of content implies that platforms mediating the access to content must be able to do that independently of the user location, type of terminal, network conditions and content formats.In addition, user preferences, environmental conditions and content owners and usage rights should be respected.The fulfillment of this concept requires the availability of a comprehensive set of metadata related with both the content and the usage environment.But how can systems coherently and easily exchange, inter-relate and use the different types of required metainformation?This paper presents the solution developed within the ENTHRONE project with this aim, describing the mechanisms designed for publishing multimedia content and all relevant metadata associated with the consumption of that content, in an open and unified form, for accessing that content upon request of end-users and decide if and what kind of adaptation operations are needed to provide a context-aware service to the end user.The solution is based on the MPEG-21 standard and on the adoption of a modular and distributed architecture to implement the required functionality.