Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

An ontology-based expert locator system in a Web 2.0-oriented personal learning environment

The Artificial Intelligence Workshops (AIW) 2011 are held in conjunction the 3rd Malaysian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MJCAI 2011), and the 3rd Semantic Technology And Knowledge Engineering Conference (STAKE 2011) at UNITEN Putrajaya Campus, Malaysia.2011-2012 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperVersion of RecordPublishe

Ontological interpretation of network monitoring data

Interpreting measurement and monitoring data from networks in general and the Internet in particular is a challenge. The motivation for this work has been to in- vestigate new ways to bridge the gap between the kind of data which are available and the more developed information which is needed by network stakeholders to support decision making and network management. Specific problems of syntax, semantics, conflicting data and modeling domain-specific knowledge have been identified. The methods developed and tested have used the Resource Descrip- tion Framework (rdf) and the ontology languages of the Semantic Web to bring together data from disparate sources into unified knowledgebases in two discrete case studies, both using real network data. Those knowledgebases have then been demonstrated to be usable and valuable sources of information about the networks concerned. Some success has been achieved in overcoming each of the identified problems using these techniques, proving the thesis that taking an ontological ap- proach to the processing of network monitoring data can be a very useful technique for overcoming problems of interpretation and for making information available to those who need it

Broker-based service-oriented content adaptation framework

Electronic documents are becoming increasingly rich in content and varied in format and structure. At the same time, user preferences vary towards the contents and their devices are getting increasingly varied in capabilities. This mismatch between rich contents and user preferences along with the end device capability presents a challenge in providing ubiquitous access to these contents. Content adaptation is primarily used to bridge the mismatch by providing users with contents that is tailored to the given contexts e.g., device capability, preferences, or network bandwidth. Existing content adaptation systems employing these approaches such as client-side, server-side or proxy-side adaptation, operate in isolation, often encounter limited adaptation functionality, get overload if too many concurrent users and open to single point of failure, thus limiting the scope and scale of their services. To move beyond these shortcomings, this thesis establishes the basis for developing content adaptation solutions that are efficient and scalable. It presents a framework to enable content adaptation to be consumed as Web services provided by third-party service providers, which is termed as “service-oriented content adaptation”. Towards this perspective, this thesis addresses five key issues – how to enable content adaptation as services (serviceoriented framework); how to locate services in the network (service discovery protocol); how to select best possible services (path determination); how to provide quality assurance (service level agreement (SLA) framework); and how to negotiate quality of service (QoS negotiation). Specifically, we have: (i) identified the key research challenges for service-oriented content adaptation, along with a systematic understanding of the content adaptation research spectrum, captured in a taxonomy of content adaptation systems; (ii) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for enabling content adaptation as Web services, providing the facilities to serve clients’ content adaptation requests through the client-side brokering; (iii) developed a service discovery protocol, by taking into account the searching space, searching time, match type of the services and physical location of the service providers; (iv) developed a mechanism to choose the best possible combination of services to serve a given content adaptation request, considering QoS levels offered; (v) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for managing quality through the conceptualization of service level agreement; and (vi) introduced a strategy for QoS negotiation between multiple brokers and service providers, by taking into account the incoming requests and server utilization and, thus requiring the basis of determining serving priority and negotiating new QoS levels. The performance of the proposed solutions are compared with other competitive solutions and shown to be substantially better

XML-based approaches for the integration of heterogeneous bio-molecular data

Background: The today's public database infrastructure spans a very large collection of heterogeneous biological data, opening new opportunities for molecular biology, bio-medical and bioinformatics research, but raising also new problems for their integration and computational processing. Results: In this paper we survey the most interesting and novel approaches for the representation, integration and management of different kinds of biological data by exploiting XML and the related recommendations and approaches. Moreover, we present new and interesting cutting edge approaches for the appropriate management of heterogeneous biological data represented through XML. Conclusion: XML has succeeded in the integration of heterogeneous biomolecular information, and has established itself as the syntactic glue for biological data sources. Nevertheless, a large variety of XML-based data formats have been proposed, thus resulting in a difficult effective integration of bioinformatics data schemes. The adoption of a few semantic-rich standard formats is urgent to achieve a seamless integration of the current biological resources. </p

Wedding planner in a box

Marriage describes the connection of two souls who promise to become one heart. Everyone dreams their marriage to be nearly perfect and that will happen only if they are able to make their wedding plan with best packages. In this busy world, many couples delay their wedding mainly because of high budget required to meet their dream wedding ceremony. Wedding ceremony requires careful and meticulous planning from many aspects such as choosing the food, make up, decoration, and gifts

Resistance and Production in the Ruins of Pedagogy and Student Writing

This thesis is an examination of the (im)possibility of the critical in pedagogy and student writing. More specifically, using Foucault’s concept of governance, and his genealogical problematization of power/knowledge which animates and constrains the present, it interrogates normative understandings of ‘the critical’ as a criterion against which practice and language are evaluated in the academy. A poststructuralist, materialist approach to understanding academic work and its subjects is developed and employed in exploring the ‘ruins’ of pedagogy and student writing, where the metaphor of ‘ruins’ refers to ‘the crumbling edifice of Enlightenment values’ (Maclure 2011:997). Foucault’s methods and sensitivities, and Derrida’s understanding of the ‘event’ of writing, are conjointly put to work to problematise the operations of power in the governance, administration and legitimation of hegemonic understandings of ‘the critical’ in higher education. Deploying as analytical notions and tools Foucault’s understanding of power as multiple forces of resistance and consent, or as an immanence in our doings which operates in minute, micro-physical heterogeneous ways, this thesis scrutinizes the ways the present of critical pedagogical practice, and undergraduate student writing in the field of intercultural communication, is produced and conditioned from within. The ineluctable oscillation between resistance and consent in such presents puts into question the post- possibility of ‘the critical’, here understood as ‘the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis’ (Derrida 2006:87) within the ‘matrix of calculabilities’ in the university (Ball & Olmedo 2012:103). This question is put into context in relation to the wider field of pedagogical and student writing practices. Using close reading of student assessment texts, contingent ‘micro-practices of resistance’ are considered for ways they fleetingly keep openness in play, and proposed as one tentative way forward for a post-critical praxis of literacy pedagogy and writing