The Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) addresses the delivery of

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

resources under different and varying

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

conditions, diverse

terminal equipment In telecommunication, the term terminal equipment has the following meanings: * Communications equipment at either end of a communications link, used to permit the stations involved to accomplish the mission for which the link was established. * I ...

capabilities, specific user or creator preferences and needs and usage environment conditions. UMA refers to the truly ubiquitous access to and consumption of multimedia content, aiming at guaranteeing unrestricted access to multimedia content: * from any device; * through any

; * independently of the original content format; * with guarantees and efficiently and * satisfying user preferences and usage environment conditions.

Requirements

The fulfilment of UMA requires that: * Content is remotely accessible and searchable; * Availability of useful descriptions about the content; * Availability of useful descriptions about the context (e.g., knowledge about the terminal capabilities); * Existence of content mediation/delivery systems able to use the above information to provide the intended value to their users independently of location, type of terminal devices being used or network connections, regardless of the format of the content, respecting user preferences, environmental conditions and content owners and usage rights.

Approach

One feasible approach to implement UMA, is to develop context-aware systems that use the content and context descriptions to decide upon the need to adapt the content before delivering it to the end-user. The use of open ontologies and standards to structure, represent and convey those descriptions as well as to specify the kind of adaptation operations is vital for the success of UMA. This is especially true in loosely coupled environments such as the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, where

heterogeneous Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts often used in the sciences and statistics relating to the uniformity of a substance or organism. A material or image that is homogeneous is uniform in composition or character (i.e. color, shape, siz ...

end-users devices, varied content formats, repositories and networking technologies co-exist. Standards from the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

such as OWL (

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for variou ...

) or CC/PP (Content Capability/Preferences Profile) and from

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...

such as

MPEG-7 MPEG-7 is a multimedia content description standard. It was standardized in ISO/ IEC 15938 (Multimedia content description interface). This description will be associated with the content itself, to allow fast and efficient searching for material th ...

and especially

MPEG-21 The MPEG-21 standard, from the Moving Picture Experts Group, aims at defining an open framework for multimedia applications. MPEG-21 is ratified in the standards ISO/IEC 21000 - Multimedia framework (MPEG-21). MPEG-21 is based on two essential con ...

, are well-suited for the implementation of UMA-enabler systems.

References

{{reflist Telecommunication services