Generic mapping mechanism between content description metadata and user environments

The number of terminals that have access to multimedia content by means of a network is rapidly increasing. More and more, the characteristics of different terminals are increasing in variety. In addition, their users can have different preferences. Therefore, the adaptation of multimedia content to a specific terminal and/or its user has become an important research issue. Such an adaptation is mainly based on two aspects: the description of the multimedia content and the description of the user environment. Both can be considered as metadata, and can be formatted in an XML language (e.g., MPEG-7 and CC/PP). However, it is not yet clear how we can realize a generic mapping mechanism between two such vocabularies. We feel that such a mechanism is necessary to accomplish a mature content adaptation framework. This paper describes how such a mechanism can be achieved. We attach requirements and preferences of the user environment to specific aspects of the description of multimedia content. Based on this information, we try to maximize the value of the adapted content, while making it appropriate for the terminal. We also take into account the extensibility of the existing vocabularies we focus on, because this means our mechanism will also be extensible.