Personalized and Ubiquitous Information Services for TV Programs

We present an overview of on-going research, system design and middleware that has been im-plemented on top of a relational DBMS to pro-vide advanced personalized information services in an integrated digital TV and Internet environ-ment. The middleware provides automatic selec-tion of programs or parts of programs based on users ’ preferences. It is compatible to the TV-Anytime Forum specifications for user and pro-gram metadata providing extended capabilities for information retrieval using the Extended Boolean model. Adaptation of preferences based on users ’ viewing histories is also supported as well as the integration of domain specific on-tologies to metadata standards. The metadata are managed robustly by a relational dbms allowing concurrency, remote access and modification. The system design and implementation empha-sizes the use of standards (like TV-Anytime, MPEG-7, XML) for interfacing with the open outside world. Video is accessed based on its content and delivered in a variety of delivering channels including TVs, PCs, mobiles and PDAs. 1