Metadata for Mobile Content Adaptation
October 12-13, 2004

Benefits of Mobile Content
Customers are willing to pay
Billing relationship
New way to reach customers
Brand extension
New revenue streams
Customers willing to pay

Challenges of Mobile Content
The right content, when customers want it
Multiple-use content breaks down
Customers not as forgiving as with Web
Paying customers demand higher quality
You’ve been alerted to new content (paid for) but is it relevant?
You need to find content fast, where is it?
Search results must be relevant
Personalization is an imperative

Extra work for content providers
High quality, standardized metadata
Short versions?
Special content for mobile channel?
Is it worth the work?
Content value chain
More channels = increased revenue  (chicken and egg)

Metadata
Quality metadata enhances the user experience
Mobile user experience: right content now, not “what you probably want to see.”
Content service providers can adapt formats, but it cannot invent information reliably
Standardized metadata enhances up-sell/cross-sell opportunities
Madonna News article -> Madonna Ring Tone -> Madonna Video -> Madonna Alert
Child protection systems more reliable
Content service providers can facilitate business relationships between content providers

Metadata meets “Context”
User context (née “Preferences”)
Location
At work / at home / on holiday
Age
Topics of interest (“likes Madonna”)
Connections to others
Schedule
Situational Context
In a meeting
At a conference
Travelling to Dublin
At a concert
Event-based context
Time of day
Current events (the Olympics)
News/Information
Messages
Application-specific information (e.g. flight timetables)
Putting it all together:
When you pick up your mobile phone on your way to the airport for your trip to Dublin to attend a conference on metadata, you see that your flight has been cancelled and are easily able to rebook on an alternate flight.
When you arrive in Dublin, you again glance at your phone and see that there’s a surprise Madonna concert happening the day after your conference. You’re prompted for whether you want to buy tickets now and extend your stay an extra day.
While at the conference, you receive only high priority messages.
At dinner, your phone tells you that there are others attending the same conference who will also be going to the concert – you can choose whether or not to advertise this fact yourself to your colleagues. You bond with your fellow Madonna fans.
The next day, at the concert, you create mobile blog entries using your camera phone. News wires pick up your pictures and you get some nice royalties.
…or other, more innovative, ideas…

The VCML Approach
Vodafone’s internal mark-up for portal integration
Built to satisfy a set of specific use cases / requirements
Encoding Metadata and Context (Application) information separately from content
Cross-references between
content and metadata elements.
Extensible approach, incorporating
existing metadata standards (PRISM,
Dublin Core) and proprietary namespaces.
Metadata available to any upstream processor to enable adaptation.
Enabling semantics to be linked to presentation elements (e.g. column 2 of this game results table is the team name and column 5 is their score) means you can adapt content to the appropriate medium.
Showing the whole table; showing just columns 2 and 5; reading team name and score aloud

Further Challenges
Identity
Metadata is most useful when linked to user data, which implies identity
Need a standard for federated identity / federated user profile
This standard needs to be aligned with other industry metadata efforts
Privacy
Who gets to see my profile?
Data protection rules differ depending on location and jurisdiction
If I’m advertising that I’m a child whenever I make an HTTP request from my phone, does that make me safer or less safe?
Standardized metadata vocabularies also required
Ok – we agree what an “music artist name” is, but what do I call Prince?

Conclusion
Metadata is crucial for providing coherent user experiences, particularly when it comes to mobile devices
Lack of standardization for metadata inclusion means metadata exists in “islands” and is not widely understood/implemented
Standardization of will lead to an “ecosystem” of services based around metadata, and help to deliver truly innovative experiences to mobile platforms
Further standardization in the area of metadata vocabularies is also required
Work on metadata must be aligned with other industry work on identity
Thanks,
Dan Appelquist
Vodafone Group Technology
daniel.appelquist@vodafone.com