6.4 Multimedia Middleware

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In the age of proliferating information and communication systems, information is becoming a vital production and service provision factor. The interaction between different categories of users is thoroughly supported by multimedia, and without intensive communication and cooperation, this interaction is hardly manageable. To accomplish this level of interaction, an efficient information, communication, and cooperation environment is crucial. ^[7] The realization of such an environment requires a middleware that provides the necessary multimedia services for the cooperative applications and that also abstracts network and delivery details.

For instance, consider the following cooperative application scenario: In an established working group, participants are exchanging e-mails, phone calls, and several types of multimedia documents. The exchange relies on a multimedia middleware that informs participants, based on their preferences and via their mobile phones, of each new message exchanged on the reflector. In addition, the middleware provides services to search multimedia documents by semantics, to receive multimedia presentations, and to establish peer-to-peer connections between participants.

In this context, a multimedia middleware based on the MPEG-21 frame-work is a promising technology. MPEG-21 provides for this purpose, in one framework, the low-level functionality that a multimedia middleware must supply: provision of Quality of Service Management, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and XML Data and Streaming Management. MPEG-21 also guarantees efficiency through the use of codecs for XML streams, the capacity of integrating other codecs (e.g., for MPEG-4), and an efficient security and trust management. Furthermore, MPEG-21 smoothly integrates older standards used in cooperative multimedia applications for content negotiations, such as CONNEG from Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ^[8] and Composite Capability and Preference Profiles (CC-PP) from W3C. ^[9]

Related standard middleware such as CORBA, Java-RMI, Jini, .NET, and so forth, support different subsets of the required features of a multimedia middleware; but none of them supports all requirements. ^[10] Especially missing are satisfactory support for Quality of Service, for adaptation, and for intellectual property management and protection. Thus, MPEG-21 seems a good candidate to bridge the gap between multimedia applications and the network.

Finally, let us note that MPEG-21 is not limited to the management of multimedia material but may also integrate nonmultimedia shared objects in cooperative applications; for example, courseware material in learning applications, registration information of a new community member, digital signatures, and so forth.

^[7]Kosch, H., Böszörményi, L., Stary, C., and Becker, C., Distributed multimedia object/component systems and qos in distributed object systems, in Proceedings of the Workshops held at the 15th European Conference for Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) 2001, Budapest, June 2001, LNCS 2323, Springer-Verlag, New York, pp. 7–29.

^[8]Protocol-Independent Content Negotiation Framework. IETF-RFC 2703, September 1999.

^[9]Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): Structure and Vocabularies, W3C Working Draft, March 25, 2003, http://www.w3.org/TR/CCPP-struct-vocab/.

^[10]Perry, M., O'Hara, K., Sellen, A., Brown, B.A.T., and Harper, R., Dealing with mobility: understanding access anytime, anywhere, ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact., 8, 323–347, 2001.

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