Digital Rights Metadata Management and Retrieval on Structured Overlay Networks

This paper introduces a suitable way for indexing multimedia metadata on a structured Peer-to-Peer overlay network, with special care to the management of rights metadata expressed by MPEG-21. We have selected a suitable subset of MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language elements to be indexed, in order to map governed contents into a flat space and allow insertion and retrieval of digital contents. Furthermore, we present a distributed application built on a structured overlay network enabling the search of multimedia items using rights related information. Our solution is completely decentralized and can be exploited in any MPEG-21 compliant metadata representation.