The DAVIC - Digital Audio Visual Council - consortium composed a complete architecture for the provision of multimedia services by selecting a number of standard tools ranging from the application layer down to the physical aspects. The DAVIC 1.0 architecture differentiates between content, service and network providers.

JUPITER concentrates on service consumer and service provider systems. The picture below depicts the components involved according to the DAVIC architecture. It also highlights the extent of JUPITER, that covers interoperability aspects related to the service consumer and service provider systems.

A primary goal of JUPITER is to provide guidelines for the implementation of DAVIC compliant sub-systems, by singling out the weaknesses in the DAVIC specifications, suggesting solutions and supporting the relevant standardization activities.

The areas of interoperability tests addressed in JUPITER are therefore:

• MPEG2: compressed video and audio data stream
• DSMCC-UU protocol: access and command protocol, e.g. to video server
• MHEG5: control of multimedia objects, e.g. browsing and selecting

JUPITER aims to implement reference configurations for an audio visual interactive system which is compliant to main parts of the DAVIC 1.0 specifications. Taking into account that recommendations regarding conformance and interoperability issues are not yet available, the PNOs involved in JUPITER define convenient conformance test suites as well as test cases and implement testing tools. JUPITER also provides for feed back to technical groups of both the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/IEC) and the DAVIC consortium for interoperability and conformance testing aspects.