Multimedia Web Services Research Articles

A semantic annotation for MaaS services: the SA4MaaS approach

In a previous work, we have defined a full service approach to compose MaaS services for multimedia data researching. This approach is based on a four-phase process: description, filtering, clustering and restitution. In this work, we are especially interested in the description phase of multimedia web services. Several approaches have been defined with the aim to semantically describe web services. We propose a new approach, Semantic Annotation for MaaS SA4MaaS services, as an extension of the W3C recommendation on semantics for web services SAWSDL. We use two ontologies: a Domain Ontology, whose concepts define semantics of the business domain, and a Multimedia Ontology, whose concepts define a set of annotation properties for describing multimedia content. We show via our implementation how to automatically generate SAWSDL files from SA4MaaS annotations. An evaluation in a medical domain is allowed to validate the approach.

A Web Service Framework Supporting Multimedia Streaming

The transfer of streaming data is not well supported by current web services standards. To include multimedia streaming support in the web services domain, this paper presents a novel multimedia streaming web services framework for the transfer of streaming multimedia content. First, the framework includes an implementation of a query service for publishing a description of the multimedia content that is input to or output from a multimedia web service. This query service is specified in an extension of WSDL. Using MPEG-7 metadata, content descriptions can be queried before the invocation of a multimedia web service. Second, two new MEPs and their SOAP HTTP bindings are created for the exchange of streaming data between two SOAP endpoints. The implementations of these new MEPs use the MIME multipart/related structure and MTOM packaging when transferring the multimedia packets as SOAP messages. To reduce the transfer overhead introduced by the packaging method, this paper investigated extensively the application of various compression schemes for the SOAP messages as well as for the packaging of the binary packet data. Experiments show that the proposed framework can achieve a performance comparable to a simple HTTP multimedia streaming method.

Recommending multimedia web services in a multi-device environment

In the last years, the Web community has shown a broad interest in Web services that handle multimedia contents. To improve the usability of these services different tools have been proposed in the literature, and in this context agent-based recommender systems appear to be a promising solution. However, the recommender systems presented in the past do not take into account, in their recommendation algorithms, the effect of the device exploited by the user, while it is clear that the same user shows a different behavior in the presence of different devices. This paper tries to give a contribution in this setting, in order to match more accurately user preferences and interests. In particular, a new agent-based system is proposed, whose architecture allows to compute recommendations of multimedia Web services, considering the effect of the currently exploited device. Some experimental results confirm the high quality of the recommendations generated by the proposed approach.

Capturing the functionality of Web services with functional descriptions

Many have left their footprints on the field of semantic RESTful Web service description. Albeit some of the propositions are even W3C Recommendations, none of the proposed standards could gain significant adoption with Web service providers. Some approaches were supposedly too complex and verbose, others were considered not RESTful, and some failed to reach a significant majority of API providers for a combination of the reasons above. While we neither have the silver bullet for universal Web service description, with this paper, we want to suggest a lightweight approach called RESTdesc. It expresses the semantics of Web services by pre- and postconditions in simple N3 rules, and integrates existing standards and conventions such as Link headers, HTTP OPTIONS, and URI templates for discovery and interaction. This approach keeps the complexity to a minimum, yet still enables service descriptions with full semantic expressiveness. A sample implementation on the topic of multimedia Web services verifies the effectiveness of our approach.

Multimedia Web Services Performance: Analysis and Quantification of Binary Data Compression

Multimedia Web services constitute a considerable load on Internet bandwidth and on Web servers. With the increasing demand of multimedia Web services, the need to maintain a respectable QoS is a major concern for multimedia Web services’ providers. Binary data compression, lossy and lossless, increases performance gain and maintains QoS, at large and small-scale implementations. At the expense of increased CPU processing time, data compression provides a reliable solution to sustain QoS parameters such as response time, download time and server delay where bandwidth is limited. This paper presents a detailed analysis, which is based upon realistic and representative data, in order to quantify the performance gain for multimedia Web services due to the application of binary image compression. To provide data for our analysis method, we have built an image-retrieval Web service that provides a set of images in both compressed and non-compressed form. The work in this paper promotes the utilisation of multimedia compression techniques and proposes the integration of multimedia compression techniques in current Web standards such as HTTP. The analysis method and results can be extended and adapted to various service and network models, such as wireless LAN, Ad-Hoc, mobile networks, IP-telephony and distributed systems.

A novel approach to visualize web anomaly attacks in pervasive computing environment

These days, a pervasive computing environment is a rapidly changing trend towards increasingly always-on connected computing devices in the convergence environment. In a pervasive computing environment, there are various multimedia web services and communications for various devices in order to provide interesting and invaluable information to users. Meanwhile, providing a wide variety of the web-based multimedia services and communications may cause various security threats and abnormal behaviors. In this paper, a multimedia visualization approach for pervasive computing environment is proposed which analyzes HTTP request and response header information to detect and visualize multimedia web attacks based on the Bayesian method. We conducted a few cases' experiment for the verification of the proposed approach in a real environment. The experimental results such as web attack detection visualization, scanning and password attack visualization, and attacker's position tracking visualization verify the usability of the proposed approach.

An open framework supporting multimedia web services

With the rapid emergence of Web services, more and more Web services are published on the Internet as resources for Web application development. There may exist some relationships among different Web services, such as exact match, plug-in match, and irrelevant. In this paper, we discuss a set of requirements related to multimedia Web services, and propose a three-tier framework to establish an open environment supporting multimedia Web services, while partially implementing the requirements. This paper focuses on the design of the service broker tier that is essential for future Web services-oriented system design and integration and enabling Web services more transparent, interoperable, and fault-tolerate.

Standards for image annotation using Semantic Web

The impetus behind Semantic Web research remains the vision of supplementing availability with utility; that is, the World Wide Web provides availability of digital media, but the Semantic Web will allow presently available digital media to be used in unseen ways. An example of such an application is multimedia retrieval. At present, there are vast amounts of digital media available on the web. Once this media gets associated with machine-understandable metadata, the web can serve as a potentially unlimited supplier for multimedia web services, which could populate themselves by searching for keywords and subsequently retrieving images or articles, which is precisely the type of system that is proposed in this paper. Such a system requires solid interoperability, a central ontology, semantic agent search capabilities, and standards. Specifically, this paper explores this cross-section of image annotation and Semantic Web services, models the web service components that constitute such a system, discusses the sequential, cooperative execution of these Semantic Web services, and introduces intelligent storage of image semantics as part of a semantic link space.

A Service-Oriented Multimedia Componentization Model

As Web services become more and more popular, how to manage multimedia Web services that can be composed as value-added service solutions remains challenging. This paper presents a service-oriented multimedia componentization model to support Quality of Service (QoS)-centered, device-independent multimedia Web services, which seamlessly incorporates cutting-edge technologies relating to Web services. A multimedia Web service is divided into control flow and data flow. Each can be delivered via different infrastructures and channels. Enhancements are proposed to facilitate Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) protocols to improve their flexibility to serve multimedia Web services. We present a set of experiments that show the viability of our service-oriented componentization model that can support efficient delivery and management of multimedia Web services.

Application-level differentiated multimedia Web services using quality aware transcoding

The ability of a Web service to provide low-latency access to its content is constrained by available network bandwidth. While providing differentiated quality of service (QoS) is typically enforced through network mechanisms, in this paper we introduce a robust mechanism for managing network resources using application-specific characteristics of Web services. We use transcoding to allow Web servers to customize the size of objects constituting a Web page, and hence the bandwidth consumed by that page, by dynamically varying the size of multimedia objects on a per-client basis. We leverage our earlier work on characterizing quality versus size tradeoffs in transcoding JPEG images to supply more information for determining the quality and size of the object to transmit. We evaluate the performance benefits of incorporating this information in a series of bandwidth management policies using realistic workloads and access scenarios to drive our system. The principal contribution of this paper is the demonstration that it is possible to use informed transcoding techniques to provide differentiated service and to dynamically allocate available bandwidth among different client classes, while delivering good quality of information content for all clients. We also show that it is possible to customize multimedia objects to the highly variable network conditions experienced by mobile clients in order to provide acceptable quality and latency depending on the networks used in accessing the service. We show that policies that aggressively transcode the larger images can produce images with quality factor values that closely follow the untranscoded base case while still saving as much as 150 kB. A transcoding policy that has knowledge of the characteristics of the link to the client can avoid as many as 40% of (unnecessary) transcodings.