The Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) addresses the delivery of

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

resources under different and varying network conditions, diverse

terminal equipment In telecommunications, the term terminal equipment has the following meanings: * Communications equipment at either end of a communications link, used to permit the stations involved to accomplish the mission for which the link was established. * ...

capabilities, specific user or creator preferences and needs and usage environment conditions. It aims for guaranteed unrestricted access to multimedia content from any device, through any network, independently of the original content format, efficiently satisfying user preferences and usage environment conditions.

Requirements

The fulfilment of UMA requires that content is remotely searchable and accessible, with useful descriptions of it and its context, and mediation/delivery systems can use this information to serve users regardless of location, format and type of terminal or network connections, respecting user preferences, environmental conditions and ownership and usage rights.

Approach

One feasible approach to implement UMA, is to develop context-aware systems that use the content and context descriptions to decide upon the need to adapt the content before delivering it to the end-user. The use of open ontologies and standards to structure, represent and convey those descriptions as well as to specify the kind of adaptation operations is vital for the success of UMA. This is especially true in loosely coupled environments such as the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

, where

heterogeneous Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts relating to the uniformity of a substance, process or image. A homogeneous feature is uniform in composition or character (i.e., color, shape, size, weight, height, distribution, texture, language, i ...

end-users devices, varied content formats, repositories and networking technologies co-exist. Standards from the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

such as OWL (

Web Ontology Language The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of Knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge representation languages for authoring Ontology (information science), ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe Taxonomy, taxonomies and ...

) or CC/PP (Content Capability/Preferences Profile) and from

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; ) is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies. IEC standards cover a vast range of ...

such as MPEG-7 and especially

MPEG-21 The MPEG-21 standard, from the Moving Picture Experts Group, aims at defining an open framework for multimedia applications. MPEG-21 is ratified in the standards ISO/IEC 21000 - Multimedia framework (MPEG-21). MPEG-21 is based on two essential con ...

, are well-suited for the implementation of UMA-enabler systems.

References

{{reflist Telecommunication services