Using context to assist the adaptation of protected multimedia content in virtual collaboration applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for a virtual classroom application based on a Virtual Collaboration System (VCS), which is being developed under the VISNET II Network of Excellence (NoE) 1 , and discusses adaptation technologies that enable seamless access to classroom sessions while intellectual property and digital rights are managed. The proposed virtual classroom framework enables academic institutions to conduct their collaborative lecture series, to which registered students will be able to attend remotely and interactively over the Internet. Furthermore, the general public may also follow the classroom sessions under certain restrictions imposed by the participating institutions. In order to facilitate seamless access to a heterogeneous audience that is composed of users with various preferences and privileges accessing the classroom sessions over different network infrastructures and using terminal devices with diverse capabilities, context-aware content adaptation is required to meet constraints imposed by the usage context and enhance the quality of the user experience. Thus, this paper describes the concepts and functionalities of a context-aware content adaptation platform that suits the requirements of such multimedia application scenarios. This platform is able to consume low-level contextual information to infer higher-level contexts, and thus decide the need for and type of adaptation operations to be performed upon the content. In this way, it is aimed to meet usage constraints while also satisfying restrictions imposed by the Digital Rights Management (DRM) to govern the use of protected content.

Agents for Enriched Services (AES): A generic agent - Based adaptation framework

“…Enterprises have also found benefit in the web allowing communication between workers to improve their collaboration; however, as established by Zhu [14] adaptability is a key element in a collaboration environment. As seen in [1] an adaptive collaboration framework for a virtual classroom application, adaptive collaboration greatly improves learning compared to a scenario where adaptation is not considered.…”

Contextual information in virtual collaboration systems beyond current standards

“…During the following discussions, we first describe the Virtual Collaboration application scenario, in which our work is applied. Then, we propose potential extensions to the available MPEG-21 DIA UEDs, as our previous research showed that the existing UEDs do not present adequate descriptions for Virtual Collaboration application scenarios [2].…”

Context-Aware and DRM-Enabled Content Adaptation Platform for Collaboration Applications

“…Each of these profiles consists of sets of the corresponding elements of MPEG-21 DIA UED to assure a full compliance with the standard. A detailed description of these profiles can be found in [5].…”

“…They are similar to the descriptions that humans build, and yet can be used by machines. Decision taking operations that use an ontological framework to describe the context and relationships have thus higher chances to deliver decisions closer to the human way of reasoning, and hence to the users' expectations [5]. They are triggered by low-level context generated by sensors, notifying changes in the consumption environment.…”

“…Section VI focuses on presenting the necessary interfaces between the several modules of this platform. This section also discusses a Virtual Classroom scenario [5] as a potential use case for the application of the proposed platform, so as to better elaborate the results presented in the paper. Finally, Section VII concludes the paper.…”