Helder Castro

An Integrated Management Supervisor for End-to-End Management of Heterogeneous Contents, Networks, and Terminals enabling Quality of Service

End-to-end support for Quality of Service (QoS) has been broadly discussed in the literature. Many technologies have been proposed, each focusing on specific aspects for providing QoS guarantees to the end user. However, the integrated management of the end-to-end chain preserving QoS in heterogeneous environments is still a significant issue and insufficiently addressed to date. In this paper we propose an integrated management supervisor that takes into account the requirements from all stakeholders along the multimedia content delivery chain and provides an end-to-end management solution enabling QoS to the end user. This architecture and the subsystems that can be distributed along the end-to-end chain are detailed in this paper.

Semantically connected web resources with MPEG-21

The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. The resources that enable that process (social web sites, blogs, media objects, etc.) present growing complexity and, collectively, weave an ever more intricate web of relationships. Current technology for declaring those relationships is predominantly implicit, ambiguous and semantically poor. As a consequence, their automatic assessment is complex and error prone, preventing the satisfaction of users’ needs such as effective semantic searches. To address these limitations, whilst enabling the explicit declaration of semantically unambiguous relationships between digital resources, a solution employing structured semantic descriptors and ontologies was conceived, based on MPEG-21. This paper explains the functioning of the devised mechanism, and goes beyond that, into the definition of two novel employment venues for it, at the service of two real-world usage scenarios. These demonstrate the mechanism’s added value as a powerful alternative for the semantically aware interconnection of web resources, and highlight the increased QoE that said mechanism enables.

Digital forgetting in information-centric networks: the CONVERGENCE perspective

The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. As it evolves towards an information-centric operation, it records everything and forgets nothing, assuming that every online resource disclosed by people (photos, posts, multimedia files, etc.) is permanently valid and is to be stored forever. However, throughout their lives, people tend to change, both in their habits as well as in their views and opinions. In many situations, as the years go by, information released loses relevance or people may decide they no longer want others to access information they have previously published. The work presented in this paper strives for a new information persistence paradigm, whereby the enforcement of “digital forgetting” is implemented over an information-centric model for the Internet. The defined solution enables the definitive elimination of digital objects, either on-demand or on a pre-scheduled basis, and, hence, their “forgetting.” The solution, conceived within the framework of the European project CONVERGENCE, is based on the employment of metadata descriptions about resources, which unambiguously identify their rightful owners. This additional data is efficiently bound to the resource through the use of an extended version of the MPEG-21 Digital Item specification, and its prescriptions are enforced by CONVERGENCEs distributed provisions.

The Versatile Digital Item

This chapter provides the definition of the Versatile Digital Item, the basic unit for data distribution used within the CONVERGENCE system. It explains how the VDI builds on, and extends the scope, of the MPEG-21 Digital Item to build a self-contained data package that can be used to encapsulate any kind of digital information in an information-centric, publish-subscribe framework. This chapter details some of the most relevant aspects pertaining to the structure of the VDI, its identification, its connection into sequences, and its logical interweaving into a fabric of inter-VDI relationships. It also explores some implications of the above aspects on the system’s operations.

The Adoption of Rights Expression Language in CONVERGENCE

This chapter describes CONVERGENCE’s licensing scheme and its governance, based on the MPEG-21 part 5 standard and on the specific content protection and rights management requirements, identified in the CONVERGENCE use scenarios. In the digital media value chain, Rights Expression Languages (RELs) are used to enable controlled access to digital resources, addressing several different issues from the description of licenses to access and usage control, payments, etc. A REL is an essential component of any security infrastructure supporting differentiated controlled access to digital resources, and providing adequate protection of intellectual property rights. Among these, the project has selected the MPEG-21 part 5 open standard, which can be implemented in XML, and is one of the main current contenders for a general-purpose REL. Our scheme is designed in the light of CONVERGENCE’s ability to distribute and manage any kind of digital resource in a large distributed environment, and this chapter explains how REL data is embedded into the CONVERGENCE data unit, the Versatile Digital Item (VDI) and introduces a basic set of security features, based on digital certificates, for the enforcement of the rights and conditions expressed in CONVERGENCE licenses.