Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age

Description

"The new era of powerful, mobile computing and sensing devices having ever larger memories and personal databases brings to light a number of difficult problems in software, interface design, search, organization of information, and methods for inferring context and for sharing personal content… The authors have done an admirable job at describing the problems and opportunities and, as such, this book should be on the shelves of researchers struggling to make these mobile devices truly valuable to the ever expanding number of their users."
—David G. Stork, Chief Scientist, Ricoh Innovations

Personal Content Experience is a comprehensive introduction to mobile personal content. The book introduces and explores issues such as context capture, user interfaces for continuous mobile use, UI design for mobile media applications, metadata magic, virtual communities, and ontologies. User interactions and behavioural patterns with personal content are also covered, resulting in a ‘GEMS’ lifecycle model for analysing media devices, services, applications, and user interfaces. In addition, the book describes an extensible software architecture targeted at content management in mobile devices, pointing out the essential topics that will benefit anyone developing mobile content-intensive applications and services.

Personal Content Experience:

• Establishes a foundation for analyzing applications, services and user interfaces targeted at personal content.
• Provides a strong industrial insight, combining hands-on examples, application concepts and software architecture descriptions with theoretical frameworks and models.
• Offers a multi-disciplinary approach, considering both user perspective and technology aspects.

This book is a clear and practical guide to the field of personal content and will be invaluable to practitioners in mobile industry and digital content management, media-intensive application developers, content creators and distributors, academic researchers, and lecturers in computer science and multimedia.

 

Table of Contents

Foreword.

Acknowledgements.

List of Abbreviations.

Prologue.

Chapter 1: Digital Memories and the Personal Content Explosion.

1.1 Digital Us.

1.2 You and This Book.

1.3 Contents at a Glance.

Chapter 2: Trends Towards Mobility.

2.1 The New Nomads.

2.1.1 Five-Second Attention Span.

2.1.2 Continuous and Nomadic Mobile Use.

2.2 Mobile Device Categories.

2.2.1 Dedicated Media Devices.

2.2.2 Swiss Army Knives.

2.2.3 Toolbox Devices.

2.2.4 Accessories and Other Devices.

2.3 Mobile Compromises.

2.3.1 Teeny Weeny UIs.

2.4 Because it Can!

2.5 Convergence.

2.6 Wireless Revolution.

2.6.1 Broadcast Networks.

2.6.2 Short-Range Wireless.

2.7 Case Study: Mobile Music.

2.8 References.

Chapter 3: Mobile Personal Content Uncovered.

3.1 First there were Files.

3.1.1 From File Management to Content Management.

3.1.2 Creation and Usage make Content Personal.

3.2 Categorization.

3.3 Characteristics of Personal Content.

3.3.1 Content Explosion.

3.3.2 Personal Content is Invaluable.

3.3.3 Personal Content is Familiar . . . or Not.

3.3.4 Favourites.

3.3.5 Sharing and Communities.

3.3.6 Relations and Associations.

3.3.7 Privacy and Security Requirements.

3.4 Mobile Personal Content.

3.4.1 Mobile Personal Content is Distributed.

3.4.2 Mobile Content is Tied to Creation and Usage Context.

3.4.3 The Same Content Types, New Usage Patterns.

3.4.4 Totally New Content Types, or Extended Use of Existing Content Types.

3.4.5 New Behavioural Patterns.

3.4.6 New Challenges.

3.5 Content Wants to be Free?

3.6 GEMS, a Tool for Modelling Personal Content Experience.

3.7 References.

Chapter 4: Metadata Magic.

4.1 Metadata for Consumers: A Brief Introduction.

4.1.1 Metadata Semantics.

4.1.2 Metadata – For Managing or Enjoying?

4.2 Metadata Creation.

4.3 Metadata Maintenance.

4.4 Relations Give Meaning.

4.4.1 People as First-Class Metadata.

4.4.2 Derived Metadata.

4.5 How does Metadata Benefit the User?

4.5.1 Tracing and Recall.

4.5.2 Searching.

4.5.3 Organizing: Sorting, Grouping and Filtering.

4.5.4 Automatic Summarizing.

4.5.5 Enhancing Privacy and Security.

4.5.6 Constructing Views.

4.5.7 Better Recommendations.

4.5.8 Reusing / Remixing / Reconstructing.

4.5.9 Smoother Transition Between Applications.

4.6 Existing Approaches.

4.6.1 MARC.

4.6.2 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

4.6.3 XMP.

4.6.4 ID3v2.

4.6.5 Acidized Wav.

4.6.6 DCF and EXIF.

4.6.7 Quicktime.

4.6.8 MPEG-7.

4.6.9 RSS.

4.6.10 Summary.

4.7 The PCE Trinity: Mobility, Context and Metadata.

4.7.1 File Context.

4.7.2 Elements of Context.

4.7.3 Context is Essential for Communication.

4.8 The Challenges: Universal Metadata, Extensibility, Abuse.

4.9 Yet Another Challenge: Interoperability.

4.9.1 Personal Content Device Ecosystem.

4.9.2 Application Interoperability.

4.9.3 Existing Solutions for Interoperability.

4.10 The Dream: When Metadata Really Works.

4.11 References.

Chapter 5: Realizing a Metadata Framework.

5.1 Metadata is a Solution . . . and a Problem.

5.2 Challenges in Distributed Mobile Content Management.

5.2.1 Storage.

5.2.2 Synchronization.

5.2.3 Version Control.

5.2.4 Backing Up.

5.2.5 Content Adaptation.

5.2.6 Locating the Desired Piece of Content.

5.3 Different Types of Metadata.

5.3.1 Tags.

5.3.2 Context Capture.

5.3.3 Relationships.

5.3.4 Usage History and Events.

5.4 From Content Management to Metadata Management.

5.4.1 Cross Media Challenge and Metadata Ownership.

5.4.2 Separating Metadata from Content Binaries.

5.4.3 Preparing for the Future.

5.5 Overall Architecture.

5.6 Our Metadata Ontology.

5.6.1 Instance Metadata and the Schema.

5.6.2 Initializing the Framework.

5.6.3 Our Default Ontology.

5.6.4 Namespace.

5.6.5 Metadata Schema Objects.

5.6.6 The Most Typical Metadata Schema Objects and Attributes.

5.6.7 Events.

5.6.8 Relationships.

5.6.9 How to Handle Composite Objects.

5.6.10 URIs for Fragments.

5.6.11 Extending the Ontology.

5.7 Making a Prototype Implementation.

5.7.1 Metadata Engine.

5.7.2 Managing Schemas.

5.7.3 Why Use SQL and Especially SQLite as Persistent Storage.

5.7.4 Harvester Manager.

5.7.5 Context Engine.

5.8 Facing Real Life.

5.8.1 Memory Consumption.

5.8.2 Speed.

5.8.3 Example Usage of Metadata Engine.

5.9 Metadata Processors.

5.10 Summary.

5.11 References.

Chapter 6: User Interfaces for Mobile Media.

6.1 Human in the Loop.

6.1.1 Searching.

6.1.2 User-Centred Design.

6.2 Interacting with Mobile Personal Content.

6.2.1 Music.

6.2.2 Photos.

6.2.3 Video.

6.3 Interfaces for Mobile Media Devices.

6.3.1 Why not Speech User Interfaces for Mobiles?

6.3.2 Graphical User Interfaces.

6.3.3 Interaction Technologies and Techniques.

6.3.4 UI structure and Navigation.

6.3.5 Basic UI Components for Mobile Media.

6.4 Designing a Mobile User Interface.

6.4.1 Common UI Design Guidelines.

6.4.2 The UI Design Process and Methods.

6.4.3 Validating the Design.

6.5 Performing the GEMS Tasks.

6.5.1 Cross-GEMS Tasks: Browse and Search.

6.5.2 Get Content.

6.5.3 Enjoy Content.

6.5.4 Maintain Content.

6.5.5 Share Content.

6.5.6 Multi-Tasking in GEMS.

6.6 The Effect of Device Category on UI.

6.7 Summary.

6.8 References.

Chapter 7: Application Outlook.

7.1 General Characteristics of Mobile Applications.

7.2 Location-Based Applications.

7.2.1 Point of Interest.

7.2.2 Wayfi nding.

7.2.3 Annotations.

7.2.4 Location as Metadata.

7.2.5 Location and Communities.

7.2.6 Other Applications.

7.2.7 Discussion.

7.3 Sharing and Communities.

7.3.1 Content Sharing.

7.3.2 Content Rating.

7.3.3 Self-Expression.

7.3.4 YouTube.

7.3.5 Video Sharing Cornes of Age.

7.4 Games.

7.4.1 Mobile Games.

7.4.2 Personal Content Types Related to Games.

7.4.3 Modding.

7.4.4 Discussion.

7.5 Other Domains.

7.5.1 Personal Training.

7.5.2 Movie Subtitles.

7.5.3 Flash, Comics, Animations.

7.5.4 Discussion.

7.6 References.

Chapter 8: Timeshifting Life.

8.1 Metadata in the Years to Come.

8.1.1 Metadata Enablers.

8.2 Metadata Creation: Top-Down or Bottom-Up?

8.3 Show Me the Money.

8.4 Obstacles in Reaching the Vision.

8.4.1 Technical Problems and Challenges.

8.4.2 Human-Related Issues.

8.5 From Databases to Lifebases.

8.6 Move that Metadata!

8.7 References.

Epilogue.

Index.