A proposal on content information management for multimedia service navigation system

In the future, end-users will access various multimedia services over a broadband telecommunications network. End-users need a service broker function, called service navigation, to find services and to access them. The service navigation function requires a service menu scenario with flexible content selection strategies for various user needs and a mechanism to update content and menu information easily and timely. This paper proposes a content information management model satisfying the above requirements. In most menu-based navigation system, navigation information is only used to control menu behaviors. Therefore its scheme is optimized for each menu. This approach is not suitable for prescribed requirements. In this model, content information is divided into navigation parameters, menu object and navigation scenario. Navigation parameters are content and service information. Its scheme is independent of menu structure. A menu object is composed of some elements of navigation parameters and media data. A scenario is a menu behavior and represents content selection strategies. Our approach allows an end-user to chose several strategies for selecting a content from a menu, and a menu designer to reuse the consistent navigation information and reconfiguring mechanism of menu objects.