Device and service descriptions for ontology-based ubiquitous multimedia services

Multimedia services are becoming increasingly popular among mobile users. Ontology and related technologies have been introduced into the multimedia domain as a means to provide declarative formal representations of the domain knowledge and thus to enable intelligent multimedia processing, such as media format adaptation. The range of devices available to access media content becomes increasingly heterogeneous and at the same time ubiquitous. Users expect to access their services and content without restrictions in time or location. Users have many and different gadgets/devices with network connectivity at their disposal to receive content, ranging from their smart phones, car audio systems to laptops, or office PCs, etc. Hence there is a need to link the discovery and the description of these ambient device with multimedia domain knowledge representations in order to facilitate a ubiquitous multimedia experience. The contribution of this work is an approach for mapping device descriptions, which are leveraged on the resource discovery protocol UPnP to OWL ontology instances. The ontology instances chosen are compliant with the MPEG-21 DIA OWL-formatted ontology. This approach bridges the gap between non-semantic description mechanisms of the legacy device/services discovery protocol with the semantic multimedia domain knowledge representation