Content presentation and delivery from a single content repository to multiple media platforms

Abstract

With the advances of technology we have witnessed the birth of new hardware platforms which are able to act as content delivery mediums. The first "original" of such mediums is the Personal Computer, particularly with the explosion of the World Wide Web (WWW). Other platforms include the Mobile Phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Email Devices and Digital/Interactive TV (iTV). If one looks at each hardware platform it is possible to find different media content formats which are incompatible with each other. The diversity of these media platforms is also aggravated by the difference in navigation which each media platform offers (including features/capabilities which each media platform can offer) and also by the different expectations of the people who access them (psychological issues). This diversity has meant that publishing content to each media platform (media content format), would require a different Content Management System (CMS) which would take care of the requirements of each media content platform. In practice this is inefficient and difficult to manage since it requires keeping track of what is being published on each media platform so that each media platform shows it's version of the content; however all the versions should be semantically equivalent. If it is possible to have some generic representation of the content which can then be transformed/translated to a specific media content format for a particular media platform then it would be possible to automate the deployment of content to all the different media platforms. The objective of this project is to create a system which provides this automation. This would mean that the content publisher would be free of additional inherited complexities which are inevitable if content is to be published to different media content formats.