Software usability architectures

Catering for software usability is no longer an exclusive responsibility of client-side systems, as it is also necessary to consider the content, the network, the user, the device and the natural environment. This necessitates the development of new systems, such as personalisation systems, which can adapt multimedia content and manage shared resources. This paper presents software usability as a content personalisation problem and describes new technologies and standards, such as the MPEG-7 MPEG-21, for describing the involved entities. Finally, it presents an architecture which can maximise some of the software usability attributes.