Content4All

Cross Platform Tools for Community Content Publishing

Content4All extends the research at FOKUS related to media management beyond the boundaries of the home network.The general objective of the project is to define and prototype a cross-media content management framework with an integrated community platform for sharing multimedia and metadata information across devices like PC, iDTV, PDAs and mobile phones.

To achieve this, established technologies like P2P and instant messaging, which are based on JXTA and Jabber, along with device-specific technologies like the Multimedia Home Platform for iTV applications were used.

The core of the system is a content management system which allows provision and retrieval of cross-media content with its accompanying metadata by different commercial content providers as well as by the end users who want to share content with other members of the community.

The role of Fraunhofer FOKUS within this project is to define and prototype this content management system. That includes the central CMS server and corresponding APIs as well as a TV-Anytime ContentResourceIdentifier (CRID) server. CRIDs allow to reference content independent of its actual storage location. They do not change over time even if content is relocated or duplicated on different storage systems. As such the CRID server is essential to allow the access and content sharing between the multitudes of end devices.
This content management system allows the incorporation and retrieval.

Prototype applications for demonstration and evaluation purposes implement scenarios related to travelling communities.