Abdelkader Belkhir

SMIL builder: An incremental authoring tool for SMIL Documents

We present in this article a temporal SMIL editor with incremental verification capabilities, based on a formal Petri Net--based model. Our authoring tool, named SMIL Builder, allows the author to “build” his document step by step, while insuring at every stage the validity of the current state of the document. These incremental authoring and consistency checking features are based on the H-SMIL-Net model (Hierarchical SMIL Petri Net), a temporal extension of Petri Nets. Our aim is to propose an easy-to-use temporal environment which can satisfy a wide range of users; so we opted for an interface combining simplicity and ergonomics.

H-SMIL-Net: A Hierarchical Petri Net Model for SMIL Documents

We propose in this paper a hierarchical and temporal extension of Petri Nets for the incremental authoring of SMIL multimedia documents. The complexity of these documents can lead authors, in some cases, to specify synchronization relations which could not be satisfied during the presentation of the document, what characterizes the occurrence of inconsistencies; a consistency checking mechanism is then necessary. This new model, named H-SMIL-Net (Hierarchical SMIL-Petri Net) proposes a technique for the incremental verification of temporal consistency. The originality of the solution resides in the modular aspect of the modelling, and the local approach of verification, what optimizes the verification time after each editing operation. This formal approach has been integrated in an incremental authoring tool for SMIL presentations.

A fuzzy framework for efficient user-centric Web service selection

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsThis work falls within Web service query optimization and make use of explicit/implicit preference.An appropriate inference mechanism, borrowed from the fuzzy/approximate reasoning field, is used.A priority-based method is introduced to aggregate the elementary similarities.The top-k results are provided with user.A set of experiments is done to show the feasibility and the effectiveness of our proposal. With the development of Web technologies and the increasing usage of Internet, more and more Web Services (WS) are deployed over Internet. Therefore, there will be a large number of candidate services for fulfilling a desired task. In the last decade, several WS selection approaches are proposed to cope with this challenge. In sharp contrast to the existing WS selection approaches that focus only on user-specified preferences, in this paper, we propose a flexible and effective WS selection framework, which gives users an adequate way to express their preferences using linguistic terms, and enhance the WS selection by leveraging their contexts and profiles. The satisfaction of the candidate WS is expressed by an objective score that takes into consideration no only the user-specified preferences, but also additional preferences extracted from both his/her context and profile using fuzzy inference rules, so as to improve the effectiveness of the selection. We then introduce an effective strategy that allows for priority between the two kinds of preferences, for ranking candidate services. Experimental evaluation on a real case study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed strategy.

A similarity measure for the negotiation in web services

This paper presents a new negotiation approach integrating a similarity-based metric to measure the client’s satisfaction level by quantifying the correspondence between the features required by the client and the ones proposed by the service. This negotiation process is integrated within an adaptation platform for multimedia presentations supporting different types of terminals. The negotiation and adaptation processes are based on the management of user’s and service’s profiles. We also propose an extension of the SIP protocol to ensure the communication between the client and the server by defining new functionalities.

Automatic Generation of User's Profiles for Location-Based Adaptation of Multimedia Documents

This paper presents an extension of a multimedia adaptation platform. The extension consists, in one hand, on the integration of UMTS users and the use of a new method for the recuperation of their profiles using IVR system, and on the other hand, introducing the user localization as a new element in the management of users profiles for the adaptation platform.

Multi Matchmaking Approach for Semantic Web Services Selection Based on Fuzzy Inference

Selecting services from those available according to user preferences plays an important role due to the exploding number of services. Current solutions for services selection focus on selecting services based either only on non functional features, on context preferences or profile preferences. This paper discusses an improvement of existing services selection approaches by considering both user context and profile. The ultimate aim is to derive maximum profit from available profile and context information of the user by inferring the most relevant preferences w.r.t his/her contextual profile. Linguistic/fuzzy preference modeling and fuzzy inference based approach are used to achieve efficiently a selection process. Some experiments are conducted to validate our approach.

LODS: A Linked Open Data Based Similarity Measure

With the rapid evolution of Linked Open Data (LOD), researchers are exploiting it to solve particular problems such as semantic similarity assessment. Existing LOD-based semantic similarity approaches attach compared data (terms or concepts) to LOD resources to exploit their semantic descriptions and relationships with other resources and estimate the degree of overlap between resources. Current approaches suffer from two limitations: they focus on the analysis of links between resources and ignore the important taxonomic structure of concepts and categories used to describe resources. On the other hand, they do not exploit interlinks between LOD resources in order to enrich data used to compute the similarity score. In this paper, we overcome the above limitations by proposing a new LOD-based similarity measure based on the combination of ontological, classification and property dimensions of LOD resources.

Providing Services in an Intelligent Environment Conflict Management in Smart Home

Smart house aims to improve the lives of people by meeting their needs and providing them with the comfort and well-being they desire. On the other hand, it should ensure good energy management by controlling all equipment of home. And to do this, it must allow the delegation of service between these equipment, example, if the heating is down it is replaced with the air conditioner. But the residents of this house have not necessarily the same needs or the same vision of comfort, which often created conflicts. In the following, we propose a service conflict management for detecting and resolving conflicts of multi-users in a smart home. The conflict occurs when users access to the same service remotely via the Web or being in the house. We describe houses services and define the types of conflicts. Then we introduce the concept of the necessary and preferred profiles to resolve conflict.

DIEDA: discriminative information based on exponential discriminant analysis combined with local features representation for face and kinship verification

Face and kinship verification using facial images is a novel and challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a new system that uses discriminative information, which is based on the exponential discriminant analysis (DIEDA) combined with multiple scale descriptors. The histograms of different patches are concatenated to form a high dimensional feature vector, which represents a specific descriptor at a given scale. The projected histograms for each zone use the cosine similarity metric to reduce the feature vector dimensionality. Lastly, zone scores corresponding to various descriptors at different scales are fused and verified by using a classifier. This paper exploits discriminative side information for face and kinship verification in the wild (image pairs are from the same person or not). To tackle this problem, we take examples of the face samples with unlabeled kin relations from the labeled face in the wild dataset as the reference set. We create an optimized function by minimizing the interclass samples (with a kin relation) and maximizing the neighboring interclass samples (without a kinship relation) with the DIEDA approach. Experimental results on three publicly available face and kinship datasets show the superior performance of the proposed system over other state-of-the-art techniques.

A Hierarchical Petri Net Model for SMIL Documents

The increasing number of services and products proposed on the Web is mainly marked by the proliferating use of rich media to transmit information. The static Web as it was known during the glorious years of HTML is disappearing to let place to a more dynamic and interactive Web. Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) (SMIL1.0,1998) was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to address the lack of HTML for multimedia over the Web. It provides an easy way to compose multimedia presentations. With the W3C efforts, SMIL is becoming the most popular language in authoring multimedia presentations and it is supported by the newest versions of browsers. In authoring a SMIL multimedia presentation, the author always wants to guarantee the correctness of the SMIL script, not only syntactically but also semantically. However, the complexity of the SMIL synchronization model is such that it is difficult to guarantee the validity of a scenario using non formal methods. On the other hand, the formal techniques based on mathematical models offer a complete formal semantics and propose formal techniques for consistency checking, but are in general time consuming. In order to respect the interactivity constraint in an authoring environment, a formal model for SMIL documents must offer the best compromise between formal verification capabilities and efficiency in terms of computation time. Although many research studies were dedicated to multimedia documents authoring, only few of them has addressed temporal consistency checking problems. Yet, it is clear that the temporal consistency of a document has a direct impact on the quality of the presentation and consequently on the client satisfaction (consider the case of a presentation that stops playing before its end, a part of its semantic is lost). In order to address the lack in SMIL modelling and verification solutions, we have defined a hierarchical temporal extension of Petri Nets, named H-SMIL-Net (Hierarchical SMIL-Petri Net) (Bouyakoub & Belkhir, 2008), for the incremental authoring of SMIL multimedia documents. The H-SMIL-Net model is mapped on the SMIL hierarchical temporal structure to better fit with the modelling needs of this language. The H-SMIL-Net model is based on the SMIL-Net model defined in (Bouyakoub & Belkhir, 2007). In order to better fit with SMIL authoring requirements, we have implemented the H-SMIL-Net model within an interactive authoring environment for SMIL documents. 15