The Usage of MPEG‐21 Digital Items in Research and Practice

The aim of the MPEG‐21 standard, the so‐called Multimedia Framework, is to enable transparent and augmented use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks, devices, user preferences, and communities, notably for trading (of bits). MPEG‐21 provides an important step in MPEG's standards evolution, addressing the transaction of Digital Items among Users. This chapter provides an overview of applications making use specifically of MPEG‐21 Digital Items and a more in‐depth presentation of a few selected applications in research and practice. The first part of the chapter reviews industry adoptions such as UPnP's DIDL‐Lite – derived from a subset of MPEG‐21 DIDL – and Microsoft's Interactive Media Manager (IMM) that implemented the abstract MPEG‐21 Digital Item model using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The second part of the chapter concentrates on several EC‐funded projects (e.g., DANAE, AXMEDIS, ENTHRONE) that adopted a wide range of MPEG‐21 technologies and provided reference applications on top of it. Finally, a significant application of MPEG‐21 core concepts, namely of Digital Item Declaration (DID), Digital Item Identification (DII), and Digital Item Processing (DIP) for representing, storing, managing, and disseminating complex information assets in a digital library, is covered in the third part of this chapter.