AN ENVIRONMENT FOR EFFICIENT HANDLING OF DIGITAL ASSETS
Paulo Villegas, Stephan Herrmann, Ebroul Izquierdo, Jonathan Teh, Li-Qun Xu, IST BUSMAN Project · 2003
The proliferation of digital media assets, and particularly their easy accessibility over open networks such as the Internet, has raised challenging issues regarding management, delivery, search, retrieval and ownership protection of video content. The rapid expansion of E-commerce services and the increased distribution of digital assets over fixed and wireless networks have generated an urgent need for technologies able to deliver high quality services to content creators, providers and end users. While end-users expect easy access to digital content using query structures natural and close to human concepts, content creators and providers are looking for efficient distribution systems capable of protecting digital content and tracing illegal copies. The BUSMAN project is designing and implementing an efficient system for understanding, delivery and querying of video from large databases, fulfiling the needs of content creators, providers and end user linked by heterogeneous networks while employing and enhancing multimedia standards such as MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews related activities in the field of digital content, notably indexing, retrieval and copyright management. The BUSMAN approach to content management is then outlined in section 3, which is followed by an overview of the system architecture in section 4. The paper concludes in section 5 with the promise of a functional demonstrator in due course.