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Kendra Initiative Executive SummaryWhat is Kendra Initiative (Short)?
Kendra Initiative's mission is to drive industry to embrace an open distributed marketplace for digital media where consumers are able to use any device or application to browse, search, purchase and present content from any content catalogue, seamlessly
What is Kendra Initiative (Longer)?
Kendra Initiative is an international media, technology, academic and industry alliance. The mission is to foster an open distributed marketplace for digital media (including films, music, images, games and text). The initiative researches, recommends and develops enhancements to the digital media marketplace that facilitate interoperability between and revenue generation for content owners and service providers; to enable consumers to use any device or application to browse, search, purchase and present content from any content catalogue, seamlessly. The cross-industry stakeholder group is currently investigating content description, search, visibility, discovery, delivery and payment whilst developing and trialing prototypes and promoting support. Its goals are to:
The project is not for profit and any intellectual property created within the organisation, such as software and reference architecture, will be provided free of charge and free from usage restrictions to the global community.
Who is involved?
We have participation from all sectors in the content value chain: content owners, Internet service providers, payment service providers, software developers, device developers and consumers. In order to create this system it is necessary for all these people to work together to create an interoperable platform.
Why an open marketplace?
To increase revenue to content owners and value chain service providers and to provide consumers with a service worthy of their hard earned cash.
What's the problem right now?
Right now we have many disparate systems and models in the marketplace offering films and music for purchase. Each one of these "shops" has a fraction of the complete global catalogue. Each of them has different rules, different payment systems. Sometimes the media that they sell is tied to a device or platform that restricts the consumer's ability to play content wherever they want and when they want on whatever device they choose. For the consumer this is a fractured and confusing marketplace.
After visiting two or three of these shops, most likely, the consumer cannot find the content they seek and may give up and turn to more convenient methods: illegal file sharing. Our aim is to create legal systems that work *better* than illegal file sharing systems to service the consumer.
How are we going to do this?
We aim to seed the concept within service industries, content owners and consumers alike. To do this we are marketing the idea through the website - http://www.kendra.org.uk/ - and talking at industry events. We build practical demonstrations of proposed systems. We have a number of trials: catalogue, rules, interface, commerce, network, etc. Within each of these areas we aim to drive interoperability between all of the participants.
For example we enable all catalogue owners to publish data about their content. We can then show that we can search all of these distributed catalogues as if they were one. This is just the start. We want to do the same for payment service providers. So, we end up with a payment framework analogous to our current banking system.
How are we really going to do this?
Up till now the accepted way of solving interoperability problems like these is to introduce a set of standards for the industry to adopt and then everything will just work assuming everyone adopts the standards. Unfortunately, in the given marketplace people simply don't like to always talk the same language or use the same terminology.
For example, take two music catalogues published by different record labels. One database calls the track title "song" and the other calls it "work". How about databases published in different languages? Getting industry to adopt any one set of standard terminology is an uphill struggle given the number of people/organisations in the industry. Let's not go there. Let's enable people to talk their own language and use their own terminology.
This is where the Semantic Web comes in. Essentially, it's a framework that enables people to talk meaningfully on the Internet so that machines can make simple logical inferences. In our example we could set up a statement like "when record label A says 'song' and record label B says 'work' they mean the same thing". And at that point we have essentially unified the two catalogues - at least from the consumer's point of view.
The Semantic Web is still in development. It is cutting edge. What we are doing is taking a few ideas and incorporating them into our demonstrations. We like to say that we will be compatible with but not reliant on the Semantic Web. We are creating very simple tools to enable people to publish and search distributed catalogues using this technology.
What do we need?
Simple, we need: people and organisations to get involved in the project; funding to pay for development of our demonstrations; content owners and those from other content value chain links to participate; marketing and celebrity endorsements.
Implications beyond Kendra
In a sense one could view Kendra as a test bed for a more general application of these simple Semantic Web applications: a world where all statements, news items, music tracks, films, opinions are thought of simply as objects that can be rated, voted on, translated, transformed, bought, sold and given away.
Kendra Foundation is a company limited by guarantee which hosts the project.
Contact: Daniel Harris - details can be found at http://www.kendra.org.uk/contact.php
See Kendra Initiative Funding Summary too.