An Interoperability Framework for the Management of Semantic Metadata in order to support Personalized TV Services Chrisa Tsinaraki, Eleni Fatourou, Stavros Christodoulakis MUSIC/TUC, Technical University of Crete Campus, 73100 Kounoupidiana, Crete, Greece {chrisa, eleni, stavros}@ced.tuc.gr Abstract In this paper, we describe a framework for the management of semantic metadata for audiovisual content description. The main objectives of this work are to provide a framework allowing enhanced retrieval performance, better support in the indexing phase and better user interfaces for audiovisual data, based on extensions of the well accepted international standards for the digital media, digital broadcasting and TV-Anytime domains like TV-Anytime and MPEG-7, as well as to provide an interoperability framework between TV-Anytime and MPEG-7 for the rapidly expanding set of interoperating digital library and interactive TV applications. The framework was developed in the context of the UP-TV project, which investigates TV-Anytime architectures and services. Our approach is ontology-driven, in the sense that we provide ontology based domain-specific extensions of the standards for describing multimedia content. Several aspects of the framework are based on the existence of ontologies. Our framework provides compatibility in indexing between the two standards and interoperability for TV-Anytime and digital library applications supported by TV- Anytime servers. We have developed a domain-specific ontology (football games) to test our framework ideas and implementation. The developed ontology uses as primitive modelling elements those provided by the MPEG-7 metadata model. The mapping of the ontology to TV-Anytime metadata primitives is straightforward. We show in detail the concrete implementation of the framework on top of relational databases and its interfaces with the other system components. 1. Introduction We are witnessing the last few years increasing cooperation (and sometimes merging) of computer, home electronics, software, broadcasting and audiovisual information provision industries. Some of the more popular scenarios offered to users include digital audiovisual libraries [8], [11], [6], video on demand services [3] [16] [17] [19] and recently TV-Anytime services [15]. The simpler TV-Anytime scenario foresees that future TVs will be equipped with a processor and large, inexpensive disk storage devices that will be capable of selecting on a continuous basis broadcasted digital TV programs for the user to see on his spare time, according to his personal interests (profile). More recently, the TV- Anytime consortium emphasizes also an open home TV platform with Internet connection capabilities, as well as high-speed access to TV-Anytime Servers, which have expanded program-capturing