MCDL: A Reduced But Extensible Multimedia Contents Description Language

Multimedia contents are more and more present in our life and their presentation usually rests on a text-based description that defines rules and properties of such contents and is produced by markup description languages (e.g., XML, MPEG7-DDL and SMIL). Although effective, the criticism to such approach regards the length of the produced description, which is considered too verbose. Since this may lead to performance problems for devices with limited resources, binary-based descriptions are being proposed. However, the simplicity of a text-based description cannot be underestimated and hence, the contribution of this paper is the proposal of a reduced, but extensible, markup Multimedia Contents Description Language (MCDL), which produces short text-based description of multimedia contents. MCDL is designed to organize and synchronize contents forthe mobile music scenario and a comparison study with other languages shows that MCDL describes the same contents with a much shorter description.