Visual Media Coding and Transmission

11.5 Generation of Contextual Information and Profiling

The first part of this section presents standardized descriptions for context in a generic multimedia scenario. This is followed by the description on how to represent contextual information based on profiles. As will be explained, the intention of using profiles is to promote interoperability and facilitate the use of context in real-world applications. This section then discusses the problem of how gathering contextual information can affect a user's privacy. Finally, it provides details regarding the generation and aggregation of contextual information from diverse sources.

11.5.1 Types and Representations of Contextual Information

(Portion reprinted, with permission, from V. Barbosa, A. Carreras, H. Kodikara Arachchi, S. Dogan, M.T. Andrade, J. Delgado, A.M. Kondoz, “A scalable platform for context-aware and DRM-enabled adaptation of multimedia content”, in ICT-Mobile Summit 2008 Conference Proceedings, Paul Cunningham & Miriam Cunningham (Eds), IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2008. ©2008 IIMC Ltd and ICT Mobile Summit.)

Contextual information has a very broad definition. As seen in Section 11.2.1.1, the term context can be applied to many different aspects and characteristics of the complete delivery and consumption environment. The discussion on the context-aware content adaptation platform in this chapter is based on the assumption that a standardized representation of the contextual information ...