A Smart Multimedia Object (SMO) Modelling for Designing Interactive Digital Television Content

Nowadays, the world of interactive applications is growing due to the users´ needs that expect increasingly complex scenarios under a high level of interactivity. The explosive growth of interactive multimedia applications creates the need for advanced methods of content management and the reusability aspects of interactive multimedia content. Digital media technology is becoming an integral part of our daily activities, and using multimedia objects in building rich and interactive content for ITV (interactive TV) is a complex task. This is basically due to the fact that there is a lack of production chain tools such as authoring tools that are needed to perform the content production activities. Another issue is that there is no convergence of standards in terms of methodologies and multimedia representation. This is also true for the application level. Another way in which the user can freely interact with those multimedia objects makes the applications needs to know how to adapt for the situations in order to improve the interaction. In such a context, we believe that the fact to converge on the principles of the intelligent multimedia objects is the right solution. Then, we suggest a new approach for the modelling of adaptable and reusable multimedia content called smart multimedia object (SMO) approach.