Special Session on Multimedia Service Composition

ACM Multimedia 2004 is seeking to extend the boundaries of multimedia research presented at the conference through the introduction of its Brave New Topics Sessions. The first Brave New Topic session at ACM Multimedia 2004 will discuss the importance of multimedia service compositions for research and developments of large scale prototypes. Service orientation is a concept strongly discussed and researched in the Web community today. Web services are built to take over an essential part of everyday's responsibilities and their composition is expected to extend their benefits to even complex tasks and value chains. Besides the efficient provisioning and improved reusability of components, the move from data-driven to service-driven architectures promises to open up a whole new field of value adding applications built on top of these basic components.

Also the multimedia community currently is on the move from monolithic multimedia applications towards more flexible solutions that can be provided either between content providers and clients or even peer to peer over the network. But whereas the multimedia community effectively handles data and even provides sophisticated standards for media coding accompanied with meta-data descriptions (e.g. MPEG-7, MPEG-21), the useful concepts from Web services research did not yet make a broad impact on multimedia systems development. On the other hand, these Web-based concepts and constructs are invariant to new data types that are being heavily explored in the multimedia community. The benefit of bringing together novel Web-based service oriented concepts and the sophisticated handling and processing of multimedia data and annotations thus is mutual.

Please click here for a session summary.

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Date/Time and Organizers

The special session on multimedia service composition is one of four brave new topic sessions on ACM Multimedia 2004 and will take place on Tuesday, October 12, 2004, 10:30-12:00 am. The session will feature invited presentations from adademia and industry and is co-chaired by:

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Featured Talks

K. Nahrstedt (UIUC) and W.-T. Balke (UC Berkeley)
A Taxonomy for Multimedia Service Composition
The realization of multimedia systems still heavily relies on building monolithic systems that need to be reengineered for every change in the application and little of which can be reused in subsequent developments even for similar applications. Service-based architectures form a possible solution to this problem: The service-based paradigm decomposes complex tasks into smaller independent entities, and then supports a flexible service composition in a variety of ways. However, due to the rich semantic structure of multimedia data and workflows, a direct application of Web-based research results is still difficult. Web service frameworks cannot yet cope with the complexity of multimedia applications and their metadata. This talk presents a basic taxonomy for the composition of services to support complex multimedia workflows. We will investigate in detail the necessary steps and methodology for multimedia service compositions and apply our taxonomy to different service composition instances. We will illustrate all composition instances within our taxonomy with case studies and point to possible techniques for the composition problem.

M. Wagner and W. Kellerer (NTT CoCoMo Euro Labs)
Web Services Selection for Distributed Composition of Multimedia Content
Growing numbers of pervasive devices are gaining access to the Internet. However, much of the existing rich multimedia content cannot be handled by mobile client devices with limited communication, processing, storage and display capabilities. In this talk, we propose new ways to enhance the universal access to multimedia content through Web Services and Semantic Web concepts. A semantic-based personalized delivery concept is drafted that makes use of these emerging technologies together with rather classical multimedia transcoding ideas. Instead of large, monolithic portal applications designed for multi-purpose adaptation and a single-source delivery, we propose to shift multimedia adaptation functionality to a portfolio of adequately selected Web Services. Web Services accessible through standard interfaces that allow for multimedia format conversion and composition can allow for a more flexible, application-independent adaptation and thus ease multimedia service provisioning essentially.

K. Lakshminarayanan, I. Stoica (UC Berkeley) and K. Wehrle (University Tübingen)
Support for Service Composition in i3
This talk considers the problem of service composition in a wide area network, where an end-user can send its packets through intermediate processing points (middleboxes), which can perform a variety of services. Examples of such services are filtering, intrusion detection, anonymization, transcoding, and caching. We argue that the Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) - an overlay network architecture that enables users to locate services and control the path followed by their packets - provides a natural platform for service composition. We discuss the challenges in implementing service compositions on top of i3, and suggest several approaches to address these challenges.

D. Xu and X. Jiang (Purdue University)
Towards an Integrated Multimedia Service Hosting Overlay
With the proliferation of multimedia data sources on the Internet, we envision an increasing demand for value-added and functionrich multimedia services that transport, process, and analyze multimedia data on behalf of end users. More importantly, multimedia services are expected to be easily accessible and composable by users. In this talk, we propose MSODA, a service-oriented platform that hosts a wide spectrum of media services provided by different parties. From the user's point of view, MSODA is a shared “market” for media service access and composition. For a media service provider, MSODA creates a virtual dedicated environment for service deployment and management. Finally, the underlying MSODA middleware performs the key functions of service composition, configuration, and mapping for users. We discuss key challenges in the design of MSODA and present preliminary results towards its full realization.