Open Service Platform for Pervasive Multimedia Services Development

The transition from delivery network and terminal oriented development of multimedia services towards multi-network and multi-terminal services is an emerging trend. This change in multimedia service development is enabled by still ongoing IP convergence of communication networks and digitalization of content. This paper presents a metadata-enabled service platform supporting development of pervasive multimedia services spanning over multiple networks and terminals, namely CAM4Home Open Platform developed in ITEA2-CAM4Home research project. The platform provides enabling services for interworking development of personalized and context aware multimedia services operating over multiple networks and multiple terminals. The platform provides a service oriented architecture and enabling services that can be used in compositions to build different types of full-featured end-to-end multimedia services. In addition, the platform introduces a novel meta-model and related metadata services enabling unified way of describing information about multimedia content, services, and user-and environment context. The platform relies on use of standardized Web Services and RDF technologies enabling operating system and network independent access to the services; thus allowing creation of pervasive and platform-independent services for any Internet connected platforms from embedded devices to mobile phones and full-featured desktop clients.