Workplan

Main milestones

Workpackages

WP1 Project Management

Objectives:

• Liase with Commission Services and facilitate communication between partners
• Provide Reports as specified in the contract and project economic administration
• Risks and Contingency Plans
• Consortium Meetings organisation

Project management will co-ordinate work, control deviations, report to the EC and interact with regional bodies. The management structure will have: a technical and administrative manager responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of the day-to-day management of the project by applying proven management techniques and procedures. The organisation hierarchy will consist of a management board with the main representatives of each organisation, the project manager responsible for the progress of the project, who has to report to the management board, team leaders, leaders of each work package, and a quality assurance manager responsible for ensuring that the quality criteria and contingency plan applies to the project. The project management will be backed by communication tools and risk and contingency measures.

WP2 C4A Actors Requirements

Objectives:

• To gather societal requirements in terms of future expectations of iTV
• To identify the P2P, cross-media technology state-of-art
• To characterise the value-chain of the key market actors in the Cross-media, iTV sector

CONTENT4ALL will start with the analysis of market requirements and technical requirements. Study of the market requirements will include a societal state-of-the-art analysis, which will develop a view of foreseen usage experiences. . The main actors will come from content providers, publishers, broadcasters, network operators, third party partners such as advertisers and merchandising vendors and citizens. The working methodology will be based on quantitative studies (ie. Arousing improvements to already existing systems and covering new end-users’ needs) and qualitative studies (ie. proposing new content applications and options to show the acceptance of these new products). The above market-driven analysis will be complemented with the analysis of the capabilities offered by technology. The technology partners will act as a “reality check” in this iterative process in order to make sure that the planned system will be feasible to build within the timeframe of the project. The analysis of the technology capabilities will be an active task throughout the whole duration of the project.

WP3 System Specifications

Objectives:

• Design of the C4A System Architecture
• Specification of the C4A network infrastructure which combines existing broadcast and client/server technologies with innovative P2P functionality
• Specification of a distributed content management system and the underlying metadata
• Specification of C4A services and end user applications

The scope of this WP is to design the C4A system architecture and the interfaces between its components. The work will be closely aligned with the requirements defined in WP2.

A Cross-media network will be specified which combines existing client/server and broadcast functionality with new emerging P2P technologies. Due to the number of different devices a modular design will be used, which will enable usage of lightweight versions for mobile devices with somehow limited functionality as well as fully functional versions for servers and personal computers, as well as set-top boxes. The overall system will demonstrate the viability of collaborative cross-media publishing.

WP4 Development & Integration

Objectives:

• To develop management tools for content management and affinities communities management
• To develop adapted multimedia content for a P2P Cross-media network to demonstrate the possibilities to producers, publishers, broadcasters and end-users
• To develop a set of interactive travel oriented infotainment services to demonstrate the possibilities offered for the complete e-value chain actors collaborative infotainment networks
• To integrate content and services into a fully functional prototype

Integration will play an important role, where content, hardware devices and software modules will have to be integrated into a fully functional prototype. All tools and components developed in the project will be integrated into the demonstrator – running a number of applications on different devices (TV, PC, PDA, Mobile phones). Servers supporting the required functionalities will be set up and incorporated.

It will facilitate different types of integration based on pilot focus and user constraints and preferences:

• Data-based integration, facilitating interactions by means of custom-made or native interface components to particular system under consideration
• Workflow integration (if needed), respect to specific user-dependent scenarios
• Web-based integration, facilitating interchange between front-end and different applicative systems
• Service-based integration, which will affect the process management and communication levels
• Interoperability integration, proving content discovery and acquisition including personalisation services.
• Cross-media integration, the compatibility with a number of different devices will be tested (ITV, Broadband, Wireless, TV, PC, PDA, Mobile phones).

Component-based integration, which will concern CORBA/DCOM-based and Java mobile code provision of brokerage services based on events handled by corresponding objects.

WP5 Trials & Evaluation

Objectives:

• To design the methodology to validate the C4A applications and services
• To specify the trials set-up and conditions under which the trials will take place
• To undertake the validation processes in a number of pre-selected scenarios
• To evaluation the technical and business/market risks attached to the technical developments

The mission of the WP is to provide the project technical partners with real feedback about how end-users perform with the C4A prototype. It will provide key knowledge about the functionality, usability, ease-of-use of the platform and, on-top-of-that, their opinion about the overall impression and satisfaction of the provided new services and capabilities. For this purpose a number of trials will be organised and executed, gradually along the project, to follow the successive technical outputs and its integration into the final prototype. The topic of the evaluation will be Travel Infotainment.

WP6 C4A Market Models

Objectives:

• Specify and construct business models of the X-media P2P market of selected cases/scenarios
• Implement business network models into simulation software and build interface for stakeholders interaction
• Create simulations of the business network models.

WP7 Dissemination & Standardisation

Objectives:

• To define and execute the dissemination plan
• To participate in EU-sponsored clustering activities
• To monitor and evaluate relevant standardisation activities
• To produce and submit CONTENT4ALL guidelines to relevant standardisation bodies

The mission of the WP is twofold: disseminate project results to potential customers and to contribute to standardisation bodies.