Digital-item-based media management system and applications

This paper presents a new system architecture for managing multimedia content based on the digital item concept defined by MPEG-21. The focus is to provide a common interface such that: (1) media resources and metadata can be bound together and accessed seamlessly via a single platform-independent abstraction; (2) arbitrary, heterogeneous metadata formats can be used; and (3) content can be reliably exchanged and shared across different platforms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of such a system via two real-world applications: a media server product and a digital match management system for sports content.