Annotating Mobile Multimedia Messages with Spatio-temporal Information

Mobile messaging started with Short Messaging Service (SMS). Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) was recently introduced, allowing users to send and receive messages composed of text, audio, images and even movie clips. In this paper, we propose a new step in the evolution of mobile messaging by introducing the Annotated Multimedia Messaging Service (AMMS). AMMS is in short an MMS document augmented with metadata that facilitates efficient structuring, storage, search and retrieval of mobile media content. We currently restrict the metadata to describe time and place, and show how to include this information in an MMS document by using the existing specification without changes. We suggest some applications that may be realized on the foundations of this simple, yet powerful, concept, both in the personal market and in the professional domain. A prototype framework called Been-There-Done-That has been implemented, where users can generate AMMS documents and upload them to an Internet server. The messages are accessible through a web based map application.