The Distributed Multimedia Applications Group (DMAG) is a research group of the Computer Architecture Department at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Although the group has its origins in the late 80s at the UPC, it was formally set up in 1999 at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and it moved back to the UPC in 2006. Currently, the group has around 15 full-time researchers, most of them with a PhD.

The current research and development activities mainly deal with the creation, management and distribution of multimedia content in a secure and interoperable way. Research topics include Digital management of rights, Metadata interoperability, Multimedia search, Security and privacy and Ontologies and semantics. The main application areas are Content life cycle, E-Health, Online social networks and E-Services. A key issue in all the previous topics and areas is international standardisation.

The DMAG has recently participated or is currently participating in research projects such as the European Integrated Project AXMEDIS, the European Network of Excellence VISNET-II, the Spanish research projects MCM-LC (TEC2008), MUSITECA (Avanza I+D) and Segur@ (CENIT), or the Catalan government co-funded project CulturaLive.

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, Multimedia applications (MPEG-A, MPQF, MPEG-M), Metadata (JPSearch), Ontologies (MVCO); and previously on Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP), multimedia document architectures, document filing and retrieval, interactive document manipulation, communication services, etc. Currently, members of the group are active in ISO/IEC JTC1 MPEG and JPEG standardisation, providing reference software, experiments and specifications.