Leveraging MPEG-21 User Description for Interoperable Recommender Systems

The paper introduces the MPEG-21 User Description standard, referred to as MPEG-21 UD, aimed at enabling the horizontal integration of recommendations coming from different service providers. MPEG-21 UD specifies standard descriptions for a given user, her context and available services. In addition MPEG-21 UD specifies standard formats for recommendations. In this way a generic provider can horizontally integrate standard descriptions belonging to different recommendation services thus possibly returning to the user richer recommendations and, likely, a better fruition.