I-WORLD Project Abstract

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@cordance.net>]

I am forwarding the following summary of the I-WORLD Project to XDI TC members at the request of TC member Giovanni Bartolomeo.

 

Any TC member interested in participating should contact him directly at the email address he uses on the list.

 

=Drummond

 

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I-WORLD

Background and strategic goals

The lowest-common denominator in the Information Society is the digital file or stream. Music, tax returns, films, software, and sensitive personal data (bank account and credit card information, medical records, tax information) are all stored as files and moved around as files or streams – often in multiple copies on multiple machines.  I-WORLD is based on the premise that current file-based approaches to information management are no longer adequate to societal needs. The files we use in our business and private lives are machine and operating system dependent, we have no uniform way of structuring them into larger “information packages”, identifying them, searching for them, copying them, backing them up, synchronizing multiple copies, or controlling the way they are accessed and used. Many of these issues have already been addressed by the multimedia community and the standards it has proposed. The strategic goal of I-World is to leverage and extend this work as the basis for a new information infrastructure capable of effectively handling the needs of producers and consumers of digital information in a world where the number of producers is often comparable to the number of consumers.

Existing standards and emerging requirements

One of the key enablers of today’s media  revolution has been the emergence of well-defined, broadly accepted standards – in particular the standards produced by the MPEG community. Over the years the scope of these standards have steadily expanded, beginning with digital video and audio compression (MPEG1), moving into the area of transport and digital TV (MPEG2), multimedia object support (MPEG4), formal description of multimedia objects (MPEG7) and a framework for the management of these objects (MPEG21). The existence of the MPEG standards has spawned not only novel applications (e.g. MP3 players, file sharing applications) but even new industries (e.g. online sales of music).

Many of the requirements of the broad world of information are common to multimedia and are effectively addressed in the MPEG standards (and in ongoing standardization work). These include standard ways of providing metainformation , standard ways of describing the content and structure complex “digital items”, naming conventions, methods for encapsulating new, emerging standards, methods for search, retrieval , backup and copying, methods for the assertion and management of “digital rights”.

But information providers and consumers also have requirements which go beyond those addressed by current standards. In particular:

·        They are interested in a practically unlimited variety of different classes of information.  It is not possible therefore to pre-define a finite class hierarchy and a finite description of meta-information which will satisfy all user needs. An effective system for handling the universe of digital information should allow users to define new classes of information, and new kinds of metainformation.

·        The content of the information exchanged between providers and consumers changes far more rapidly than is common in the multimedia world. Once a provider releases a song or a film, it remains mostly static. But a parts catalog or a CV change continuously. This creates new requirements: e.g. the need to check if a copy of a digital item is up to date, the need to request an update.

·        A key development in modern information society is the steadily mounting volume structured information describing attributes of the physical and social world, e.g. location information, identity information, digital maps, digital (barcode or RFID-based) identifiers for physical objects etc.. Any universal system for managing digital information should include methods for handling this kind of information

·        Users of digital information (and European privacy legislation) have extremely stringent requirements on the security and privacy of the information they exchange. It is likely that in many cases these will be qualitatively different from the requirements of multimedia providers, whose products are designed, by their very nature, for use by the general public.

·        Private users may need to exert forms of control over digital information which are not usually required by multimedia providers (e.g. express legal consent to use of specific kinds of information, assert a limit date for the validity of the information)

Specific goals

Given the strong foundations provided by existing standards, and the emergence of new needs, not fully addressed by these standards, the specific goals of I-WORLD are to:

·         Define and develop the concept of a “Versatile Digital Item” (VDI). This will be an extension of the “digital item”, concept introduced in MPEG 21. A key feature of Versatile Digital Items is that users should be able  to define and encapsulate new classes of content, and related meta-information

·        Define a standard set of operations on VDIs, including and extending the operations identified in MW3, another standard developed by  the MPEG-21  community. These will include but not be limited to creation of VDIs, naming of VDIs, seaching for VDIs, reading and writing the attributes and content of VDIs, copying and backing up VDIs, efficiently synchronizing VDIs between multiple machines

·        Specify (and create reference implementations of) open source middleware supporting these operations

·        Develop a small set of demonstrator applications showing the effectiveness and usefulness of the solutions proposed

·        Develop business model(s) showing how participants intend to exploit the work performed in the project.