Metadata engine for TV-Anytime compliant set-top box

This paper presents a design of metadata engine based on a relational database architecture for a TV-Anytime compliant set-top box. As TV-Anytime metadata is described in XML, it is split into a set of fragments when it is transferred. The proposed metadata engine is designed so that access to fragment metadata can be minimized when responding to metadata requests from various set-top box applications.