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Book review: Digital Interactive TV and Metadata. One way to determine the level of growth of a research field is to assess the availability of relevant conferences, journals and books. In particular, the latter is a good measure of the maturity of the field, since they provide an overview of a critical mass of published work. In the interactive TV field, there been more than a few conferences and special issues in journals, but books are still scarce. So, it was a pleasant surprise to discover the book "Digital Interactive TV and Metadata", which was written by a very active team of researchers from the Digital Media Institute at the Tampere University of Technology, in Finland.

The first part of the book (Theory) begins with a short overview of DTV standards and the respective applications types that are enabled by this basic set of industry standards. Next, the book surveys the fields of Web, multimedia, DTV, in order to provide an extensive overview of metadata standards, which is the core focus of this work. Having laid the background theory, the authors present the "Digital Broadcast Item Model", which they have helped define, in the context of the MPEG21 standard. The first part of the book closes with a discussion of the implementation requirements for metadata in DTV systems.

The second part of the book (Application) begins with an interdisciplinary analysis of DTV in the fields of business strategy, consumer behaviour and narrative, all of which are put in a metadata context at the end of the chapter. Next, the authors describe the application of metadata in several DTV fields, such as digital rights management, production, interactive TV content, and personalization. The book closes with a discussion of a few innovative applications and future scenarios for DTV.

Overall, it is a rather accessible technical book for DTV and metadata. It is suitable for researchers and developers of DTV systems. In a field that is in constant growth it would have run the risk of missing recent developments, but the book is coupled with a web site that offers additional and up-to-date information. Moreover, the website offers complementary teaching material (slides, handouts and exercises) that can be used for teaching a DTV and metadata module in university programs. I am looking forward to similar efforts for the rest of the research themes in interactive TV.

October 16, 2004

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