Modeling a Core Module for MPEG-21 and AXMEDIS Content Manipulation Tools

Cross media and hypermedia content formats and related tools have to have to take into account aspects related to the protection and management of intellectually property right along the value chain from content production to content distribution up to the final user. This trend is provoked by the usage of digital content and rights management in the business to business transactions and by the fact that final users are becoming every day closer to the content producers: posting their content, protecting their content and defining rules for its usage, etc. Therefore, new models and solutions to cope with content packaging and protected content manipulation are needed. On this view, the relevance of MPEG-21 standard is growing, while little has been performed about the modeling of authoring tools and players for the production/consumption of MPEG-21 digital objects. The design of MPEG-21 tools presents several critical points to be solved at architectural and modeling levels to ensure security and flexibility for manipulating any kind of digital resource that may be contained in an MPEG-21 package. This paper presents the evolution of models for content packing with a formalization that allows reasoning and verifying the model validity against extended requirements of the B2B area. The study has produced the AXMEDIS model and metadata (defined on top of MPEG-21 standard) for which a set of innovative software tools have been produced. The AXMEDIS model and components for content authoring/integration tools and final users’ players, supports MPEG-21 and extends it according to the spirit of the standard. The proposed solution provides both data manipulation flexibility and a high level of security when digital resources are used for creating more complex objects, in the respect of intellectually property right. It can be used to develop a wide range of tools based on MPEG-21 standard and it is at the basis of the authoring and player tools realized for the AXMEDIS IST FP6 R&D European Commission Integrated Project (http://www.axmedis.org )