The Distributed Multimedia Applications Group (DMAG) is a research group of the Computer Architecture Department at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), although it has some members in the Information and Communication Technologies Department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where it was formally set up in 1999. Nevertheless, the group has its origins in the late 80s at the UPC. Currently, the group has around 15 full-time researchers, having a PhD more than half of them.

The current research and development activities mainly deal with: the production, management and distribution of multimedia content in a secure and standard way, including electronic commerce of multimedia services and products and its business models; metadata use, search and interoperability to manage and store information about content; and all aspects of security, privacy and digital management of rights along the content life cycle. A key issue in all the previous topics is standardisation. Furthermore, research is also progressing on topics such as content adaptation and semantics, event reporting, ontologies and privacy and rights in online social networks.

The DMAG is currently participating in research projects such as the European Integrated Project AXMEDIS (FP6-IST-511299), the European Network of Excellence VISNET-II (FP6-IST-1-038398), the Spanish National Research project DRM-MM (TSI-2005-05277) and the Catalan government co-funded project XAC (Xarxa IP Audiovisual de Catalunya). Before, the group took part in several other European and national projects such as VISNET, the first Network of Excellence on Networked Audiovisual Systems, MOBIHEALTH, a key European take-up action in the area of mobile applications for healthcare, AgentWeb, a Spanish research project on agents and ontologies, AREA2000, an application project in the areas of digital rights management and electronic services, several European ACTS and ESPRIT projects, etc.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the group has a long experience in standardisation, as editors of several International Standards, Profiles and Recommendations (in ISO/IEC, EWOS, CEN/ISSS, ETSI and ITU-T) dealing with Rights Expression Languages (RELs) profiles, Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP), Multimedia Application Formats (MAFs), multimedia document architectures, document filing and retrieval, interactive document manipulation, communication services such as joint synchronous editing, and metadata. Currently, members of the group are active in MPEG standardisation in the area of digital rights management, digital items and metadata, providing reference software, experiments and specifications.