Fragment indexing of XML-based metadata for digital TV contents

Abstract

TV-Anytime metadata is being widely accepted as a metadata standard format that describes digital TV contents. It provides a wide spectrum of information of TV programs such as program information, program groups, program schedules, program reviews, program segments, user preferences, etc. These metadata are structured in a large hierarchical XML document. For efficiency, the metadata is split into a set of smaller pieces of metadata fragments that can be transmitted and accessed independently over a broadcast network. In this paper, we propose a fragment-based XML data indexing and querying scheme for efficient processing of TV-Anytime metadata. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs better than the generic XML data indexing and querying methods. Keywords: TV-Anytime metadata, XML indexing, metadata fragment. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg.