A framework for repurposing multimedia content

Nowadays, there are a lot of different device profiles (desktop PC, Web TV, handheld PDA, Internet screen telephones, cellular telephones, DTV and network computers, etc) for accessing online multimedia content. Developing appropriate multimedia content for each of the abovementioned devices that may also function in different networks is very expensive and somehow unmanageable. Content repurposing deals with this problem by taking multimedia content designed for a particular device or platform and automatically repurposing it to fit other platforms or devices. The basic idea is to maintain a single copy of the content in its original form and to separate the actual content from its presentation format. The approach proposed in this paper uses Web services technology to repurpose multimedia content to fit any desired device automatically. In our framework the multimedia content is stored in distributed databases and is described using metadata standards. Once the system receives a specific request, it compiles the response according to the user profile and end device. If a specific repurposing service is not available in the local system infrastructure (e.g., to transcode a tiff image into a png image), a Web services request is made to a specific UDDI server requesting an appropriate repurposing service. If a service is found we make use of its capabilities, otherwise we try to find a bridge to solve the request (e.g., transcoding tiff into jpg and then jpg into png). In this paper we describe the architecture of the system and its main functionality.