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The starting point of this book is the work developed within the Xarxa IP Audiovisual de Catalunya (XAC) project in 2005-2006, in which a group of content producers (mainly local televisions (TVs)) wanted to have the means of exchanging their multimedia contents. From the obtained results, we could identify a number of important issues that still needed to be addressed. Furthermore, our contributions should be extensible to a generic distributed multimedia scenario. Thus, our foremost requirement was to use open standards. In line with the open issues previously identified, this book presents five independent but related contributions. Our first Contribution presents a proposed adaptation authorisation technique based on MPEG-7 descriptors. Our second Contribution presents the identification of a complete standardised set of context descriptors, and an innovative approach for modelling them based on profiles. Our third Contribution presents a novel adaptation authorisation process based on the context profiles specified in Contribution 2 which improves the efficiency of the adaptation authorisation presented in Contribution 1.

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