Storing and Searching Metadata for Digital Broadcasting on Set-Top Box Environments

Abstract

Digital broadcasting is a novel paradigm for the next generation broadcasting. Its goal is to provide not only better quality of pictures but also a variety of services that is impossible in traditional airwaves broadcasting. One of the important factors for this new broadcasting environment is the interoperability among broadcasting applications since the environment is distributed. Therefore the broadcasting metadata becomes increasingly important and one of the metadata standards for a digital broadcasting is TV-Anytime metadata. TV-Anytime metadata is defined using XML schema, so its instances are XML data. In order to fulfill interoperability, a standard query language is also required and XQuery is a natural choice. There are some researches for dealing with broadcasting metadata. In our previous study, we have proposed the method for efficiently managing the broadcasting metadata in a service provider. However, the environment of a Set-Top Box for digital broadcasting is limited such as low-cost and low-setting. Therefore there are some considerations to apply general approaches for managing the metadata into the Set-Top Box. This paper proposes a method for efficiently managing the broadcasting metadata based on the Set-Top Box and a prototype of metadata management system for evaluating our method. Our system consists of a storage engine to store the metadata and an XQuery engine to search the stored metadata and uses special index for storing and searching. Our two engines are designed independently with hardware platform therefore these engines can be used in any low-cost applications to manage broadcasting metadata.