Multimedia content's metadata management for pervasive environment

Abstract

One of the major challenges of a pervasive environment is the need for adaptation of content to suit a client's specific needs and choices such as the client's preferences, the characteristics of the client device, the characteristics of the network to which the client is currently connected, as well as other related factors. In order for the adaptation to be efficient while satisfying the client's requirements and maintaining the semantics and quality of the content, the adaptation system needs to have adequate information regarding the content to be adapted, the client's profile, the network profile and others. The information regarding the content can be found from the content metadata. This work addresses the issue of content metadata management in a pervasive environment in relation to content adaptation. For this purpose, a distributed architecture for the management of metadata of multimedia content is proposed. The proposed architecture consists of components for storage, retrieval, update, and removal of metadata in the system. It also provides interfaces to external components through which metadata can be accessed. In addition, it proposes ways to specify, in the metadata, restrictions on the adaptations that may be applied on the content. This enables the content creator to impose constraints on adaptations that may potentially cause the loss of critical information or a decrease in the quality of the adapted content. © 2006 Springer.