Towards Personal Television Systems

Abstract

This book is based on the fundamental assumption that users of information systems do not need more information, but information which better corresponds to their interests and needs, i.e. information of higher quality. This work describes a personal television application whose appearance is personally adapted to each individual user. In Section 2 fundamentals of personal iTV systems are given by discussing the definition of the term “intelligent agents” and by itemizing the specific tasks of personalization and the fundamentals of intelligent assistance. The functionality of an interactive, digital and personal EPG is described as an example of personalization, hereby addressing the specific problem of managing TV channels by using an intelligent agent. The following discussion is applied to a specific category of agents, namely software agents.