MPEG-21 digital item declaration and Identification-principles and compression

Abstract

At the core of the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework is the concept of the Digital Item, a virtual container for a hierarchical structure of metadata and resources. This paper considers the Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL), gives examples of its usage, and discusses how it is used to integrate other parts of MPEG-21. The paper then discusses how Digital Item Identification integrates with the DIDL to allow MPEG-21 to utilize standard identifiers from many application spaces. Finally, an alternative, compressed form of the XML Digital Item Declaration is described. This uses schema-based compression to significantly reduce the size of these XML documents.