Experiencing standardized media fragment annotations within HTML5

W3C’s Video in the Web activity aims at a better integration of media within the Web. In this paper, we show how two specifications currently under development within this activity, i.e., Media Fragment URIs and Media Annotations, can be combined within media-enabled HTML5 Web applications. In particular, we introduce a number of extensions for the Media Annotations ontology in order to close the gap with Media Fragment URIs. Additionally, we show how rich media fragment annotations can be converted into a WebVTT file. The latter can be used by HTML5-enabled players to show the annotations in a synchronized way. Further, a fully integrated Web application has been developed that shows how both specifications can work together within an HTML5 environment. This application relies on NinSuna, our media delivery platform targeted at multichannel publication that provides server-side support for both Media Fragment URIs and Media Annotations.     

Implementation strategies for efficient media fragment retrieval

The current Web specifications such as HTML still treat video and audio resources as ‘foreign’ objects on the Web, especially lacking a transparent integration with current Web content. The Media Fragments URI specification is part of various efforts at W3C trying to make media a “first class citizen” on the Web. More specifically, with a Media Fragment URI, one can point to a media fragment by means of a URI, enabling people to identify, share, link, and consume media fragments in a standardized way. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a number of implementation strategies for Media Fragments. Additionally, we present two optimized implementation strategies: a Media Fragment Translation Service allowing to keep existing Web infrastructure such as Web servers and proxies and a fully integrated Media Fragments URI server that is independent of underlying media formats. Finally, we show how multiple bit rate media delivery can be deployed in a Media Fragments aware environment, using our Media Fragments URI server.     

Characteristics of social media stories

An emerging trend in social media is for users to create and publish “stories”, or curated lists of  Web resources, with the purpose of creating a particular narrative of interest to the user. While some stories on the Web are automatically generated, such as Facebook’s “Year in Review”, one of the most popular storytelling services is “Storify”, which provides users with curation tools to select, arrange, and annotate stories with content from social media and the Web at large. We would like to use tools, such as Storify, to present (semi-)automatically created summaries of archival collections. To support automatic story creation, we need to better understand as a baseline the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories. We investigated 14,568 stories from Storify, comprising 1,251,160 individual resources, and found that popular stories (i.e., top 25 % of views normalized by time available on the Web) have the following characteristics: 2/28/1950 elements (min/median/max), a median of 12 multimedia resources (e.g., images, video), 38 % receive continuing edits, and 11 % of their elements are missing from the live Web. We also checked the population of Archive-It collections (3109 collections comprising 305,522 seed URIs) for better understanding the characteristics of the collections that we intend to summarize. We found that the resources in human-generated stories are different from the resources in Archive-It collections. In summarizing a collection, we can only choose from what is archived (e.g., twitter.com is popular in Storify, but rare in Archive-It). However, some other characteristics of human-generated stories will be applicable, such as the number of resources.     

机顶盒家庭媒体共享系统研究与实现

数字家庭是近年来家庭电子消费领域逐渐升温的一个新概念,其定义是由家庭中的电子产品组成的互连、互操作的网络系统。基于此实现的多媒体和娱乐资源在家庭范围内的共享,成为近期技术发展的热点。机顶盒作为家庭媒体娱乐中心,除了实现传统电视直播、点播、Web浏览等业务,与家庭内其他电子设备实现媒体娱乐资源的共享成为必备的功能特性。为深入掌握家庭媒体共享技术并指导产品开发,本文对其系统构成、协议体系和工作原理等进行研究分析,并在此基础上,针对性提出了机顶盒作为媒体服务设备和媒体播放设备的基本架构和组成单元,并且对各单元功能进行详细描述,介绍了相关SDK的应用方法和流程,为机顶盒和其他家庭多媒体终端实现媒体共享功能提供了理论依据和实现参考。     

Graph Farming

The Giant Global Graph is an excellent perspective on how we can consider diverse pieces of Web infrastructure as a conceptual whole. The Web, when augmented with RDF's graph model, provides an interconnected system. The resources on the semantic Web are interconnected through logical predicates, but this layer exists on top of the coupling offered by the link, as built into the Web since day one. Resources can be identified with URIs designed for HTTP, and the primary Web mechanism is that of using HTTP to get representations of those resources.     

Recording and playing back interactive media streams

Recording systems and media servers for networked audio and video streams have become an important part of today's Internet. In contrast to this, only a few recording and playback solutions currently exist for the data streams of interactive media applications (e.g., shared whiteboards and distributed virtual environments). So far these solutions are application-specific: individual algorithms and implementations are required for each application that is to be recorded. In this paper, we are proposing generic algorithms for the recording and playback of interactive media streams. These algorithms are based on a common model for the class of interactive media. They enable full random access to recordings by initializing the replaying applications with the required state information (e.g., the current slide in a recorded presentation). We have implemented these algorithms in the Interactive Media on Demand (IMoD) system. In order to interpret the semantics of an interactive media stream, the system requires that the Real-Time Application-Level Protocol for Distributed Interactive Media (RTP/I) protocol is used for the framing of the transmitted data. Any application using RTP/I can be recorded directly using the system without any modification. Interactive media streams not using RTP/I can be recorded using the generic recording algorithms. However, they require an adaptation of the system so that it is able to extract a minimal set of information from the application-level protocol of these streams. In addition to the generic recording algorithms, we present the architecture and major design considerations of the system and discuss the experiences gained from recording different interactive media applications.     

Harvesting Wiki Consensus: Using Wikipedia Entries as Vocabulary for Knowledge Management

Vocabularies that provide unique identifiers for conceptual elements of a domain can improve precision and recall in knowledge-management applications. Although creating and maintaining such vocabularies is generally hard, wiki users easily manage to develop comprehensive, informal definitions of terms, each one identified by a URI. Here, the authors show that the URIs of Wikipedia entries are reliable identifiers for conceptual entities. They also demonstrate how Wikipedia entries can be used for annotating Web resources and knowledge assets and give precise estimates of the amount of Wikipedia URIs in terms of the popular Proton ontology's top-level concepts.     

SocialSearch + : enriching social network with web evidences

This paper introduces the problem of searching for social network accounts, e.g., Twitter accounts, with the rich information available on the Web, e.g., people names, attributes, and relationships to other people. For this purpose, we need to map Twitter accounts with Web entities. However, existing solutions building upon naive textual matching inevitably suffer low precision due to false positives (e.g., fake impersonator accounts) and false negatives (e.g., accounts using nicknames). To overcome these limitations, we leverage “relational” evidences extracted from the Web corpus. We consider two types of evidence resources—First, web-scale entity relationship graphs, extracted from name co-occurrences crawled from the Web. This co-occurrence relationship can be interpreted as an “implicit” counterpart of Twitter follower relationships. Second, web-scale relational repositories, such as Freebase with complementary strength. Using both textual and relational features obtained from these resources, we learn a ranking function aggregating these features for the accurate ordering of candidate matches. Another key contribution of this paper is to formulate confidence scoring as a separate problem from relevance ranking. A baseline approach is to use the relevance of the top match itself as the confidence score. In contrast, we train a separate classifier, using not only the top relevance score but also various statistical features extracted from the relevance scores of all candidates, and empirically validate that our approach outperforms the baseline approach. We evaluate our proposed system using real-life internet-scale entity-relationship and social network graphs.     

The Continuous Media Web: a distributed multimedia information retrieval architecture extending the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, with its paradigms of surfing and searching for information, has become the predominant system for computer-based information retrieval. Media resources, however information-rich, only play a minor role in providing information to Web users. While bandwidth (or the lack thereof) may be an excuse for this situation, the lack of surfing and searching capabilities on media resources are the real issue. We present an architecture that extends the Web to media, enabling existing Web infrastructures to provide seamless search and hyperlink capabilities for time-continuous Web resources, with only minor extensions. This makes the Web a true distributed information system for multimedia data. The article provides an overview of the specifications that have been developed and submitted to the IETF for standardization. It also presents experimental results with prototype applications.     

A novel mobile device user interface with integrated social networking services

Modern mobile devices support accessing Web-based social networking services from the user interface (UI) of Web browsers, applications, and mobile widgets. While effectively accessing these services, people may find it tedious to switch between multiple user interfaces in order to be aware of the latest content. Aiming for an improved user experience, we experimented with integration of these services into mobile devices' main user interface. The integrated content is presented beyond application silos and automatically filtered to highlight the relevant elements. A mobile system called LinkedUI was developed and deployed in one lab test and one field study. Three findings emerge from these studies. Firstly, it is feasible to construct an alternative device UI that supports integration of Web content across applications and services via hyperlinking. Time, publisher (e.g., contacts), content types, and geographical locations are key dimensions for association of content. Secondly, the alternative device UI enables better usability of accessing social networking services than accessing them from individual Web sites on mobile devices. It helps people to be aware of the latest content during microbreaks. Thirdly, automatic filtering, on the basis of one user's data, is one promising approach to identifying relevant content. Given filtered content, most people using the automatic filtering approved the functionality and experienced a better sense of control that is arguably due to the reduced information volume.     

WWWDOC系统中HTML文档的可视化编辑与浏览技术的 …

ＷＷＷ文档协同写作系统（简称ＷＷＷＤＯＣ）的ＨＴＭＬ文档的层次式结构包装技术要求对标准ＨＴＭＬ语言进行扩展,以支持文档层次结构间的超链链接和媒体引用;在此基础上实现扩展ＨＴＭＬ文档的可视化编辑和浏览导航。     

I-Media: An integrated Media server and Media database as a basic component of a cross Media publishing system

The publication of the same information on different media, the so-called Cross Media Publishing (CMP), is becoming one of the central aspects in today's publishing industry. CMP centers on a media independent document definition and an efficient integrated publishing on different media: e.g. as a paper document, as an online document in the World Wide Web, and as an offline (CD-ROM based) multimedia presentation. The aim of CMP is to get these different media at the same stage, while—and that is important—spending an acceptable amount of additional effort (in time and money) for production. In this paper we present a solution for a key problem of Cross Media Publishing, the handling of media data (images, audio, video, etc.) by using a combined approach of server and database systems functionality. The integrated multimedia server and database i-Media and its role in a complete CMP solution will be presented.     

Community and trust-aware fake media detection

Nowadays, it becomes increasingly difficult to find reliable multimedia content in the Web 2.0. Open decentralized networks (on the Web) are populated with lots of unauthenticated agents providing fake multimedia. Conventional automatic detection and authentication approaches lack scalability and the ability to capture media semantics by means of forgery. Using them in online scenarios is computationally expensive. Thus, our aim was to develop a trust-aware community approach to facilitate fake media detection. In this paper, we present our approach and highlight four important outcomes. First, a Media Quality Profile (MQP) is proposed for multimedia evaluation and semantic classification with one substantial part on estimating media authenticity based on trust-aware community ratings. Second, we employ the concept of serious gaming in our collaborative fake media detection approach overcoming the cold-start problem and providing sufficient data powering our Media Quality Profile. Third, we identify the notion of confidence, trust, distrust and their dynamics as necessary refinements of existing trust models. Finally, we improve the precision of trust-aware aggregated media authenticity ratings by introducing a trust inference algorithm for yet unknown sources uploading and rating media.     

W3C user agent accessibility guidelines 1.0 for graphical Web browsers

Web browsers and multimedia players play a critical role in making Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Access to Web content requires that Web browsers provide users with final control over the styling of rendered content, the type of content rendered and the execution of automated behaviors. The features available in Web browsers determine the extent to which users can orient themselves and navigate the structure of Web resources. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) User Agent Guidelines are part of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, the guidelines provide a comprehensive resource to Web browser and multimedia developers on the features needed to render Web content more accessibly to people with disabilities. UAAG 1.0 was developed over a period of four years and included extensive reviews to demonstrate that the proposed requirements can be implemented.     

下一代网络中媒体网关控制协议的研究

下一代网络(NGN)将控制层和媒体层分离，网关设备也因此被分解成媒体网关和媒体网关控制器。媒体网关控制协议是媒体网关和媒体网关控制器之间进行通信的协议。该文介绍了MGCP和Megaco／H．248两种媒体网关控制协议，尤其对当前较为流行的Megaco／H.248协议进行了详细的阐述，并将它与MGCP协议进行了分析比较。