USER PREFERENCE INFORMATION DATA STRUCTURE HAVING A MULTIPLE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE AND A METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROVIDING MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION USING THE SAME

摘要

A method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium encoded with a datastructure, for providing multimedia information to a user in accordance withuser preferences pertaining to consumption of multimedia content, includingmeans for storing personal information to identify a user of multimediacontent, and means for storing at least one set of user preference informationassociated with the identified user. The at least one set of user preferenceinformation includes a user preference description describing a conditionunder which the associated at least one set of user preference information isto be used to provide the multimedia information, a hierarchical structure ofaplurality of user preference categories of multimedia content preferred by theuser, and preference values defining relative user preferences for respectiveuser preference categories. In one aspect, the invention may involveproviding and/or using a user description including a user preferencedescription having a hierarchical structure to describe preferences forfilteringand searching, the hierarchical structure including a parent preferenceelement and one or more child preference elements of the parent preferenceelement, each of the parent and child preference elements including at leastone preference description to identify preferred multimedia content, whereinthe user description specifies a user identifier that includes a name.