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The Personal Electronic Program Guide - Towards the Pre-selection of Individual TV Programs

M. Ehrmantraut, T. Härder, H. Wittig, R. Steinmetz

University of Kaiserslautern
P.O. Box 3049, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
e-mail: haerder@informatik.uni-kl.de

Full paper (postscript version compressed by gzip)

Abstract:

Digital and interactive TV systems will bring hundreds of TV program channels to the people. Then, the use of existing strategies for channel selection will fail: It is neither possible to select the program by "surfing" through the channels, nor by using printed program guides. This paper describes a new approach towards creation of a Personal Electronic Program Guide (EPG) regarding the individual view preferences of a user. The foundation of individual TV program pre-selec tion is a classified and categorized TV program description and the maintenance of user profiles describing his viewing preferences. Besides creation of user profiles, an automatic update technique will be introduced. Channel selection events are taken as parameters for an adjustment of user profiles. Personal program pre-selection is done by using intelligent filtering techniques which apply individual user profiles to the TV program description (so-called matching). An approach to design and realize an EPG prototype system will be described in this paper.

Published in Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM`96), Rockville, MD., 1996, pp. 243-250.