[Other Papers] [Briefing Package]
Title: Application Standards for "Pushing" Content and Streaming Media Speaker: Hadi Partovi, Microsoft Corporation Abstract: Today's world of "pushing" content and streaming media is filled with a number of related but distant technology efforts. Each provides a solution for a focused problem, but few promise flexibility to provide an application standard for the overall problem of pushing or streaming content. The requirements for such a standard should be that (1) it allows an author to author content once and publish the content using any of the major delivery mechanisms - pull, smart pull, true push, and streaming. (2) it provides an efficient scalability story for scaling to different client-device capabilities, different network bandwidth capabilities, and different overall network sizes. (3) it enables the next generation of technology in content publishing - searching, indexing, profiling, filtering, and personalizing content, independent of the publishing mechanism. (4) it unifies the declarative metadata format that most of these technologies already use today, providing commonality to the syntax and schema, along with a procedural interface for manipulating the metadata. It is essential to have a standardized meta-data object model that can be declarative (file format) or procedural (programmatic access), along with a *vocabulary* for pushing or streaming content. Microsoft believes that the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides the ideal description language for defining metadata for push purposes. XML has matured a lot in the past year, and in the past few months many corporations and organizations have come around to agree on XML as the universal language for data. The discussion of push should not be centered around the metadata format, however, as that belongs in the RDF group. Today, the agreed-upon metadata format is XML, and tomorrow it will be the RDF model on top of XML. The discussion of push should center around providing a *vocabulary* on top of the agreed upon metadata format of XML today, RDF tomorrow. Microsoft's position on push is that the Channel Definition Format (CDF) proposal provides a great XML-based vocabulary for push. The CDF vocabulary enables smart-pull or true-push delivery of content for offline use, and offers bandwidth savings and push capabilities on different client devices or different networks. Today the CDF vocabulary is built on XML, and future *extensions* to the CDF format can and should be based on the proposals and ideas formed in the RDF discussion group, because of the advanced searching, filtering, and querying technologies that can be built upon the RDF data model.