COMMUNITY COORDINATED MULTIMEDIA: CONVERGING CONTENT-DRIVEN AND SERVICE-DRIVEN MODELS Jiehan Zhou, Mika Rautiainen, Mika Ylianttila MediaTeam, Information processing laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Oulu {first name. surname}@ee.oulu.fi ABSTRACT Human experience is being extended and enhanced by collaboratively consuming electronic and networked content and multimedia-intensive services. This technical phenomenon is addressed by our generalized Community Coordinated Multimedia model in this paper. Content-driven and service-driven models are identified and a converged CCM model is introduced. Characteristics of Community Coordinated Multimedia are specified and challenges for developing a technological framework are presented. Index Terms --Multimedia, content, communities, sharing, services 1. INTRODUCTION Personal experiences emerge from the active participation in events or activities and lead to the accumulation of knowledge, skill and enjoyment. This is made possible by ever-growing amount of networked multimedia content and services together with growing penetration of broadband Internet connections. Collaborative use of multimedia and services empowers people to experience the real world and share it with other people. The shift towards focusing on human experience is manifested by several web services that have become popular in recent years; such as Wikipedia [1], Flickr [2], YouTube [3], Joost [4] and Google Maps [5]. Wikipedia [1] offers a web platform in which anyone can edit and add an article to a collective encyclopedia. Flickr [2] provides a photo sharing website, web services suite and an online community platform where the user can upload, view and share photos with others over the Internet. YouTube [3] is a web site similar to Flickr, where the user can upload, view and share video clips. Joost [4] is a system for distributing television shows and other forms of video over the Internet. Google Maps [5] is a free on-line map service offering street maps, route planner and an urban business locator for numerous countries around the world. There are research articles addressing the issues of annotation [6-8], retrieval [9-10], and metadata generation [11-13] for multimedia content within a community. There are research articles [14- 18] addressing broadcasting, multicasting, and unicasting of multimedia service to mobile or fixed users. There are also research articles and reports [19-21] that address the development of new multimedia applications and related challenges. However, none of the studies addresses the merging of community driven consumption of multimedia and professionally produced services into a common framework in a converged way. This paper addresses the aims of the EUREKA ITEA 2 project CAM4Home 1 that focuses on creating a metadata enabled content delivery framework to allow end users and commercial content providers to create and deliver rich multimedia experiences. In this paper, we first generalize above described emerging technical phenomena with a term ‘Community Coordinated Multimedia’ (briefly, CCM). Second, we examine the two basic models of content-driven and service-driven CCM and propose a converged CCM model, focusing on entertainment application domain. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 specifies common concepts related to CCM applications. Section 3 describes a scenario, inspired and driven by an ice hockey experience in a hobbyist community. Furthermore, two basic model types, i.e., content-driven and service driven models, are examined and a converged CCM model is proposed in Section 4. Finally, characteristics of the CCM system and its challenges are discussed in Section 5. Conclusions and future work are presented in Section 6. 2. BASIC CONCEPTS Experience consists of active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge, skill or enjoyment. Experiences are being extended and enhanced collaboratively by utilizing networked and electronic content and services. Content is a collection of multimedia elements, consisting of either directly embedded or referenced URI (Universal Resource Identifier) multimedia data. Content 1 http://www.cam4home-itea.org/ 365 978-1-4244-2571-6/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE ICME 2008