New tool for household multimedia resources sharing

05 October 2009 Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

The School of Computing's Ontological Engineering Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the private companies iSOCO and Telefónica I+D have jointly developed, as part of a university-industry partnership, software for real-time image, video and audio file sharing among households connected to the telephone network. The system is expected to be deployed in the future on contents services support networks for operators like Telefónica.

To be able to share personal multimedia resources nowadays, potential users have to use social network servers. To do this, they are obliged to access and log into the social networks, and locate, download and display the resource.

This is because multimedia resources are now stored on centralized servers. Apart from making resource sharing a tedious business, this system has a number of weaknesses, including copyright and privacy problems.

Weaknesses overcome

This new tool, though, overcomes some of these weaknesses, enabling users to send a photo of their children playing football from their home for instant display on a relations' television screen, irrespective of where their respective homes are.

This shared resource is only accessible for the stated recipients that are online at the time, meaning that privacy is guaranteed. But it can be displayed by different members of the same household all over the house. The resources are easy to send from a PC.

This is the first ontology-based software developed for such a specific application. The tool, called UPnPGrid, has a distributed open software architecture enabling the exchange of information and data to networked devices, irrespective of the manufacturer, operating system, programming language, etc.

The research project kicked off in January 2008 and is due to finish in June 2010, and new functions are still under development. A number of tests have been run to check the technical feasibility of the tool.

The project, led by School of Computing professor Oscar Corcho, is also partnered by Telefónica I+D, which is responsible for managing resource interchange protocols and interconnection with new generation networks, and iSOCO, which is in charge of social networks and resource searches.

http://www.fi.upm.es/?id=tablon&acciongt=consulta1&idet=307