Semantic ambient media—an introduction

Abstract The medium is the message! And the message was literacy, media democracy and music charts. Mostly one single distinguishable medium such as TV, the Web, the radio, or books transmitted the message. Now in the age of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, where information flows through a plethora of distributed interlinked media—what is the message ambient media will tell us? What does semantic mean in this context? Which experiences will it open to us? What is content in the age of ambient media? Ambient media are embedded throughout the natural environment of the consumer—in his home, in his car, in restaurants, and on his mobile device. Predominant sample services are smart wallpapers in homes, location based services, RFID based entertainment services for children, or intelligent homes. The goal of this article is to define semantic ambient media and discuss the contributions to the Semantic Ambient Media Experience (SAME) workshop, which was held in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia conference in Vancouver in 2008. The results of the workshop can be found on: www.ambientmediaassociation.org