Semantic Mediacasting and Collaborative Feed Sharing

The advent of syndication technologies has immensely enhanced the ability of users to publish their multimedia content on the Web using techniques like multimedia blogging, moblogging and Podcasting. This paper presents a novel architecture of a semantic mediacasting system describing mediacast feeds in RDF instead of currently used RSS2.0. We have built a centralized semantic repository which can be queried for subscription and sharing of feeds and also collaborative feed sharing mechanism where a user fetches subscribed feeds and associated media content and shares it with his neighbours, acting as a pseudo-server. We have developed Poddr: a semantic mediacast aggregator, where users can subscribe to the mediacasts of their interests and get their desired multimedia content downloaded to their desktops for their consumption. Poddr is available as desktop application as well as an extension to popular Firefox Web browser. The results presented in this paper are quite promising