Semantically enabling UPnP Networks of Multimedia Home Content

There is plenty of multimedia content available in our homes, stored in multimedia disk drives, personal computers, or digital cameras. Protocols like Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) allow sharing this content among storage devices and displaying them in multimedia renderers in the local area networks of our homes. However, UPnP does not provide native support for the exchange of resources across homes neither does it provide means to describe multimedia content so as to facilitate search across multimedia resources. In this paper we describe a set of extensions to the UPnP protocol to provide a uniform access to multimedia content belonging to different homes, as well as mechanisms to create tag-based and ontology-based metadata, allowing search and Linked-Data publishing of these multimedia resources.