Operating-system support for distributed multimedia

Multimedia applications place new demands upon processors, networks and operating systems. While some network designers, through ATM for example, have considered revolutionary approaches to supporting multimedia, the same cannot be said for operating systems designers. Most work is evolutionary in nature, attempting to identify additional features that can be added to existing systems to support multimedia. Here we describe the Pegasus project's attempt to build an integrated hardware and operating system environment from\ud the ground up specifically targeted towards multimedia

Tools for modelling and simulating migration-based preservation

This report describes two tools for modelling and simulating the costs and risks of using IT storage systems for the long-term archiving of file-based AV assets. The tools include a model of storage costs, the ingest and access of files, the possibility of data corruption and loss from a range of mechanisms, and the impact of having limited resources with which to fulfill access requests and preservation actions. Applications include archive planning, development of a technology strategy, cost estimation for business planning, operational decision support, staff training and generally promoting awareness of the issues and challenges archives face in digital preservation

IPEA: the digital archive use case

Now is the time to migrate tape-based media archives to digital file-based archives for television broadcasters. These archives not only address the issue of tape-deterioration, they also create new possibilities for opening up the archive. However, the switch from tape-based to file-based is something only the very big television broadcasters can manage individually. Outer- broadcasters should work together to accomplish this task. In the Flemish part of Belgium, the two largest broadcasters in Flanders, namely the commercial broadcaster VMMa and the public broadcaster VRT, the television facilities supporting company Videohouse, and different university research groups associated with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology joined forces and started the "Innovative Platform on Electronic Archiving" project. The goal of this project is to develop common standards for the exchange and archiving of audio-visual data. In this paper, we give a detailed overview of this project and its different research topics

Two-phased knowledge formalisation for hydrometallurgical gold ore process recommendation and validation

This paper describes an approach to externalising and formalising expert knowledge involved in the design and evaluation of hydrometallurgical process chains for gold ore treatment. The objective was to create a case-based reasoning application for recommending and validating a treatment process of gold ores. We describe a twofold approach. Formalising human expert knowledge about gold mining situations enables the retrieval of similar mining contexts and respective process chains, based on prospection data gathered from a potential gold mining site. Secondly, empirical knowledge on hydrometallurgical treatments is formalised. This enabled us to evaluate and, where needed, redesign the process chain that was recommended by the first aspect of our approach. The main problems with formalisation of knowledge in the domain of gold ore refinement are the diversity and the amount of parameters used in literature and by experts to describe a mining context. We demonstrate how similarity knowledge was used to formalise literature knowledge. The evaluation of data gathered from experiments with an initial prototype workflow recommender, Auric Adviser, provides promising results

Space Station Freedom pressurized element interior design process

The process used to develop the on-orbit working and living environment of the Space Station Freedom has some very unique constraints and conditions to satisfy. The goal is to provide maximum efficiency and utilization of the available space, in on-orbit, zero G conditions that establishes a comfortable, productive, and safe working environment for the crew. The Space Station Freedom on-orbit living and working space can be divided into support for three major functions: (1) operations, maintenance, and management of the station; (2) conduct of experiments, both directly in the laboratories and remotely for experiments outside the pressurized environment; and (3) crew related functions for food preparation, housekeeping, storage, personal hygiene, health maintenance, zero G environment conditioning, and individual privacy, and rest. The process used to implement these functions, the major requirements driving the design, unique considerations and constraints that influence the design, and summaries of the analysis performed to establish the current configurations are described. Sketches and pictures showing the layout and internal arrangement of the Nodes, U.S. Laboratory and Habitation modules identify the current design relationships of the common and unique station housekeeping subsystems. The crew facilities, work stations, food preparation and eating areas (galley and wardroom), and exercise/health maintenance configurations, waste management and personal hygiene area configuration are shown. U.S. Laboratory experiment facilities and maintenance work areas planned to support the wide variety and mixtures of life science and materials processing payloads are described

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model