Semantic Knowledge Representations for Soft Data Fusion - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 11

is to help the users in choosing the programs that they would enjoy seeing. Based on
background information and the description of a new program, the system evaluates whether
the new TV program is of interest to a specific user. The recommendation system can be
coupled with a Personal Video Recording system, so that interesting programs are recorded
even when the users are not looking at TV.
The description on which the interest of a program is evaluated must therefore be very
detailed concerning the content of the program itself. It should also be as precise as possible
concerning the broadcast times so that the recording system can indicate the right slots of
time.
Within the recommendation system, we used two sources of information. The first one, called
DVB stream, is the live stream of metadata associated with the video stream on the TNT
(Télévision Numérique Terrestre). Figure 5 shows an example of the information available on
the DVB stream. The DVB stream gives descriptions of TV programs containing schedule
and title information. It is very precise concerning the begin and end times of programs
and delivers information about the technical characteristics of the audio and video streams.
However, no description of the content of the program is given.
For each TV channel, it gives the descriptions of the currently playing program as well as the
following one. The information on this source is constantly being updated. In particular, the
scheduling times of the subsequent programs are adjusted.
Fig. 5. Example of an initial observation on TNT metadata
The second source of information is an online TV magazine. The descriptions contain
information about the scheduling of the programs, their titles and the channels on which
they are scheduled. They also contain details about the contents (summary of the program,
category, actors, presenters etc). This source describes all the TV programs scheduled on all
the TV channels during one week starting from the current day. The TV program descriptions
may be updated once a day.