CollaboraTVware: a context-aware infrastructure with support for collaborative participation in an interactive digital TV environment

The increasing number of TV programmes available to users, as well as the interactive services provided, resulting from the emergence of the Interactive Digital TV increases the difficulty of selecting relevant content. In this scenario, the user participation is important in a collaborative way. This paper presents a software infrastructure in an Interactive Digital TV environment – entitled CollaboraTVware – to guide, in a transparent way, users in the choice of TV programmes and interactive services through the collaborative participation of other users with similar profile and context. The classification task, from the theory of data mining, is the approach adopted in the infrastructure design. To demonstrate the functionalities in a usage scenario, it has developed an application (collaborative EPG) as a case study that uses the CollaboraTVware.