Usability of Semantic Web for Enhancing Digital Living Experience

The number of different types of devices on the home network is expanding rapidly. While this explosion of innovation provides compelling new devices to consumers, there are challenges ensuring compatibility among these devices and providing a comprehensive user interface that supports consumers managing their digital content across several devices. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has specified an architecture that enables interoperability between the various devices and allows a user to enjoy the desired content across several devices. To complement DLNA, we investigate ontological representation from semantic web technology to model the interaction between multiple home devices and to provide an enriched and more comprehensive metadata based multimedia search. This removes the user burden of searching each device individually. Development of a prototype incorporating these ideas has begun, using a well known semantic web toolkit Jena.