Using the Semantic Web to Enhance the Digital Living Experience

With the multitude of home electronics devices available, it is becoming difficult for consumers to manage their digital content. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has specified an architecture that enables interoperability between the various devices and allows a user to enjoy the desired content. However, in a typical home, users might store thousands of multimedia items across several devices and it is tedious to search every single device individually. Additionally, in the case of a metadata-based content search, not all metadata or the semantics associated with it might be available, resulting in incomplete search results. In this paper, we extend the DLNA architecture to address these problems. We use a specialized device as a service-enabling platform and also to hide the complexity of distributed content storage. Furthermore, we use the Semantic Web to provide an enriched and more comprehensive metadata-based multimedia search experience.