Standards, IPR and digital TV convergence: theories and empirical evidence

none1Media convergence presents a few noticeable dimensions, and requests an interdisciplinary research approach. We conduct a long-run analysis of the main initiatives of technological standardization carried out in the realm of “traditional” (cable, satellite and terrestrial) digital TV, focusing on Europe, to assess the technological determinants of its apparent trends to convergence. This analysis inevitably calls into question IPR strategies and policies. In particular, we investigate how private incentives and the public agenda for interoperability have shaped the on-going convergence of the TV sector toward an “IP-based” meta-platform. Despite the widespread usage of open standards and formats, the real potential for interoperability along the digital TV filière has been modest, and mostly limited to the transmission segment. This is mainly due to the strong proprietary features characterizing the TV sector, where viable content production and provision rests on effective control of content IPR. Further, patent portfolio strategies and control of crucial copyrights become increasingly central for competing in the converging TV sector, where former telecom companies, traditional TV operators and new OTT players strive to become gatekeepers of essential layers of the new IP-based delivery platforms. To sum up, while technological opportunities today do enable pervasive media interoperability and affordable convergence at the user-level, private incentives relentlessly push the industry toward standards fragmentation and the construction of walled gardens.MPRA Working paper series n. 59359, Munich Personal RePEc ArchiveMatteucci NMatteucci, Nicol

An effective services framework for sharing educational resources

Nowadays, the growing number of software tools to support e-learning and the data they rely upon are valuable resources, supporting different aspects of the complex learning and teaching processes, including designing learning content, delivering learning activities, and evaluating students’ learning performance. However, sharing these educational resources efficiently and effectively is a challenge: there are many resources, these have not been described accurately and in general they do not interoperate, and it is common for the tools to rely on different technologies. This thesis explores a solution – a novel educational services framework – to improve the sharing of current e-resources, by applying the latest service technologies in the context of higher education. Our findings suggest that the proposed framework is effective to deal with the technical and educational issues in resource discovery, interoperability and reusability, however, there are still technical challenges remaining for implementing this service framework. This research is divided into 3 phases. The first phase investigates the sharing of elearning resources through a literature survey, and identifies limitations on current developments. In the second phase, the current problems relating to resource sharing are addressed by a proposed educational service framework, which contains both educational and technical components. Through a case study, nine e-learning services and their dataflows are identified. To determine the technical components of the framework, a novel Educational Service Architecture is proposed, which allows resources to be better described, structured and connected, by following the principles of discoverability, interoperability and reusability in service technologies. In the third phase, part of the framework is implemented and evaluated by two studies. In the first study, users’ experiences were collected via a simulation experiment, to compare the effectiveness of a service prototype with that of the use of current technologies. During the second part of the evaluation, technical challenges for implementing the services framework were identified via a case study, involving the implementation of another service prototype

Pristup integraciji tehničkih prostora zasnovan na preslikavanjima iinženjerstvu vođenom modelima

In order to automate development of integration adapters in industrial settings, a model-driven approach to adapter specification is devised. In this approach, a domain-specific modeling language is created to allow specification of mappings between integrated technical spaces. Also proposed is the mapping automation engine that comprises reuse and alignment algorithms. Based on mapping specifications, executable adapters are automatically generated and executed. Results of approach evaluations indicate that it is possible to use a model-driven approach to successfully integrate technical spaces and increase the automation by reusing domainspecific mappings from previously created adapters.За потребе повећања степена аутоматизације развоја адаптера за интеграцију у индустријском окружењу, осмишљен је моделом вођен приступ развоју адаптера. У оквиру овог приступа развијен је наменски језик за спецификацију пресликавања између техничких простора који су предмет интеграције. Приступ обухвата и алгоритме за поравнање и поновно искориштење претходно креираних пресликавања са циљем аутоматизације процеса спецификације. На основу креираних пресликавања, могуће je аутоматски генерисати извршиви код адаптера. У испитивањима приступа, показано је да је могуће успешно применити моделом вођен приступ у интеграцији техничких простора као и да је могуће успешно повећати степен аутоматизације поновним искоришћењем претходно креираних пресликавања.Za potrebe povećanja stepena automatizacije razvoja adaptera za integraciju u industrijskom okruženju, osmišljen je modelom vođen pristup razvoju adaptera. U okviru ovog pristupa razvijen je namenski jezik za specifikaciju preslikavanja između tehničkih prostora koji su predmet integracije. Pristup obuhvata i algoritme za poravnanje i ponovno iskorištenje prethodno kreiranih preslikavanja sa ciljem automatizacije procesa specifikacije. Na osnovu kreiranih preslikavanja, moguće je automatski generisati izvršivi kod adaptera. U ispitivanjima pristupa, pokazano je da je moguće uspešno primeniti modelom vođen pristup u integraciji tehničkih prostora kao i da je moguće uspešno povećati stepen automatizacije ponovnim iskorišćenjem prethodno kreiranih preslikavanja

Standards, IPR and digital TV convergence: theories and empirical evidence

Media convergence presents a few noticeable dimensions, and requests an interdisciplinary research approach. We conduct a long-run analysis of the main initiatives of technological standardization carried out in the realm of “traditional” (cable, satellite and terrestrial) digital TV, focusing on Europe, to assess the technological determinants of its apparent trends to convergence. This analysis inevitably calls into question IPR strategies and policies. In particular, we investigate how private incentives and the public agenda for interoperability have shaped the on-going convergence of the TV sector toward an “IP-based” meta-platform. Despite the widespread usage of open standards and formats, the real potential for interoperability along the digital TV filière has been modest, and mostly limited to the transmission segment. This is mainly due to the strong proprietary features characterizing the TV sector, where viable content production and provision rests on effective control of content IPR. Further, patent portfolio strategies and control of crucial copyrights become increasingly central for competing in the converging TV sector, where former telecom companies, traditional TV operators and new OTT players strive to become gatekeepers of essential layers of the new IP-based delivery platforms. To sum up, while technological opportunities today do enable pervasive media interoperability and affordable convergence at the user-level, private incentives relentlessly push the industry toward standards fragmentation and the construction of walled gardens

Standards, IPR and digital TV convergence: theories and empirical evidence

Media convergence presents a few noticeable dimensions, and requests an interdisciplinary research approach. We conduct a long-run analysis of the main initiatives of technological standardization carried out in the realm of “traditional” (cable, satellite and terrestrial) digital TV, focusing on Europe, to assess the technological determinants of its apparent trends to convergence. This analysis inevitably calls into question IPR strategies and policies. In particular, we investigate how private incentives and the public agenda for interoperability have shaped the on-going convergence of the TV sector toward an “IP-based” meta-platform. Despite the widespread usage of open standards and formats, the real potential for interoperability along the digital TV filière has been modest, and mostly limited to the transmission segment. This is mainly due to the strong proprietary features characterizing the TV sector, where viable content production and provision rests on effective control of content IPR. Further, patent portfolio strategies and control of crucial copyrights become increasingly central for competing in the converging TV sector, where former telecom companies, traditional TV operators and new OTT players strive to become gatekeepers of essential layers of the new IP-based delivery platforms. To sum up, while technological opportunities today do enable pervasive media interoperability and affordable convergence at the user-level, private incentives relentlessly push the industry toward standards fragmentation and the construction of walled gardens

Voyager spacecraft. Volume IV - Operational support equipment Final technical report, phase IA task B

Operational support equipment for Voyager spacecraf

Integration of Heterogeneous Data Sources in an Ontological Knowledge Base

In this paper we present X2R, a system for integrating heterogeneous data sources in an ontological knowledge base. The main goal of the system is to create a unified view of information stored in relational, XML and LDAP data sources within an organization, expressed in RDF using a common ontology and valid according to a prescribed set of integrity constraints. X2R supports a wide range of source schemas and target ontologies by allowing the user to define potentially complex transformations of data between the original data source and the unified knowledge base. A rich set of integrity constraint primitives has been provided to ensure the quality of the unified data set. They are also leveraged in a novel approach towards semantic optimization of SPARQL queries

Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

International audienceThe heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous e orts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s). In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be speci cally coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described e orts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short)