Infoshare: Content, Design and System Independent Multimedia Signage Architecture Anusha Withana, Miyuru Dayarathna, Masa Inakage, Kazunori Sugiura Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University 2F Collaboration Complex, 4-1-1 Hiyoshi Kohoku-ku Yokohama-city, Kanagawa, Japan 223-8526 {anusha, miyurud, inakage, uhyo}@kmd.keio.ac.jp Abstract—In this paper, we present Infoshare: a flexible and scalable information authoring and sharing architecture for mul- timedia digital signage systems. Proposed architecture internally analyze and classify content, design and system infrastructure into three different layers using metadata extracted by user input and creates a highly scalable and easy to share digital signage environment. Furthermore, this architecture enables decentralized management by defining different user roles to handle each above mentioned layers. We believe that Infoshare architecture can make an efficient Creation, Distribution and Installation (CDI) cycle for multimedia digital signage content while allowing smooth scalability and management of the system. We applied this architecture to a prototype digital signage system. Paper describes the system implementation, key features and future development directions. Index Terms—digital signage; multimedia systems; distributed systems I. I NTRODUCTION With rapid development of digital communication and dis- play systems, digital signage is emerging as a mainstream advertising and broadcasting medium [1]. Huge market pen- etration of digital signage systems are visible at many public places such as airports, train stations, shopping malls, etc. [2]. Digital signage systems usually consist of wide variety of display devices with different properties spread across multiple geographical locations catering different content requirements. In order to cater the diverse needs of the system, tradi- tional digital signage follow a straight forward, but fairly inefficient authoring and distribution architecture. In this tra- ditional model, as shown in figure 1, contents are created and served to individual display devices or signage players bundled with design and scheduling. For an example, many present professional digital signage systems are designed to serve signage screens stored in PowerPoint, Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat format files due to their popularity in use [3]. And they are individually schedule into different signage players. This posses major limitations to the scalability and the manageability of the system. In the sense of scalability, for an example, if a new signage player to be added to the system, users has to redo the design work, content adjustments and scheduling of all the existing signage contents to the particular new player. In vice-versa, all the new contents has to be individually authored to each player. Furthermore, due to the use of tied format files, content management becomes a very difficult task. For Example, changing a particular information that is embedded in several hundred files may take huge effort. And also, it is hard to manage independent roles for users as designers, content providers or system administrators since each of these roles should give a collective input to the system. Additionally, tied formats creates inefficiencies in data transmission over network since it needs to create multiple copies of the same data and information. In this paper, we present Infoshare; a scalable, digital sig- nage system and its architecture which provides easy authoring and efficient use of digital signage content. Unlike existing architectures, Infoshare divides contents, design and system infrastructure into three different layers so that they are not directly tied with each other. Here, contents means the actual information to be shown to user, such as information about an event, advertisement or a news. Design is the presentation format or the screen layouts of display system of the signage environment. System infrastructure represents physical entities such as display devices, locations and capabilities of hardware systems. Infoshare uses XAML [4] which is an XML based language for defining user interface elements to create the layout, graphics and animations of the signage system which provides means to separate the contents from design and sys- tem requirements. With use of Infoshare architecture, signage systems can scale without additional work to the existing contents, define distinguishable user roles and improve the network efficiency. Video 1 Image 1 Text 1 Layout 1 Format Definition Video 1 Image 1 Text 1 Layout 2 Format Definition Video 1 Image 1 Text 1 Layout 3 Format Definition Video 2 Image 2 Text 1 Layout 4 Format Definition Data Bundle 1 Data Bundle 2 Data Bundle 3 Data Bundle 4 User Screen 1 Screen 2 Screen 3 Screen 4 Fig. 1: Traditional signage architecture, tied contents with individual authoring to screens. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II describes some related works. Technology adaptation is 978-1-4577-0787-2/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE