D2.3 Report on current research and business targets V3.0

Transcription

D2.3 Report on current research and business targets V3.0
Framework Programme 7
“Future Media Internet Coordination action”
Contract no.: 249065
Deliverable D2.3
Report on current research and business
targets V3.0
ICT Project Number
Reference
Project URL
EU Project officer
Code name
Nature
Distribution Type (*)
Authors (Partner)
Contact Person
Acronym
FP7- 249065
nextMEDIA
nextMEDIA D2.3_SYN_V0.1_20110310
www.fi-nextmedia.eu
Mr. Georgios Kaiafas
Status draft 
final 
D2.3
Prototype  Report  Specification  Tool  Other 
PU  PP  RE  CO 
Th. Zahariadis (Synelixis)
P. Daras (CERTH), T. Piatrik (QMUL), O. Mayora (Create-net), F. Alvarez (UPM)
Guillermo Cisneros
Email [email protected] Phone +34-91 336-7344 Fax +34-91 336-7350
The deliverable provides a study of the research covered by the running and
Abstract
newly started projects of the unit, the relevant state-of the art and the business
(for dissemination)
sectors they cover, in relation with the FIA activities.
Keywords
Version Date
Version (0.1)
Change
Author (s)
Revised Outline
Listed above
Contractual Date of
February 2011
Delivery
Quality assurance
Federico Alvarez
Tomas Piatrik
reders
result
Ok
Ok
____________________________________________
(*) Distribution Type / Security: PU – Public, PP - Restricted to other program participants (including the Commission Services), RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services), CO - Confidential, only for members of the
consortium (including the Commission Services)
(**) Version: See Document History
This document is produced under the EC contract FP7 ICT-249065.
This document is property of the nextMEDIA consortium and shall not be distributed or reproduced without the written approval of
the nextMEDIA consortium
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Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .............................................................................................. 3
Acronyms ......................................................................................................................... 4
1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 5
1.1
What is new in D2.3 ............................................................................................. 5
2 Current Research Challenges.................................................................................... 7
2.1
Research Challenges in Media Delivery .............................................................. 7
2.2
Research Challenges in 3D Media ..................................................................... 16
2.3
Search and retrieval of multimedia content ........................................................ 22
2.4
Research Challenges in User Centric Media/Social Networks .......................... 28
3 Market Assessment and Business Targets .............................................................. 37
3.1
Delivery of multimedia content .......................................................................... 37
3.2
3D Media Internet Technologies ........................................................................ 42
3.3
Networked Search............................................................................................... 49
3.4
Social Network Internet Services ....................................................................... 53
4 Results from the Concertation Meetings ................................................................ 58
4.1
Spring 2010 Concertation Questionnaire for Research Challenges ................... 58
4.2
Fall 2010 Concertation Questionnaire for Standardisation ................................ 60
5 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 63
6 References .............................................................................................................. 65
7 ANNEX I: Spring 2010 Concertation Meeting ...................................................... 74
7.1
Questionnaire ...................................................................................................... 74
7.2
Detailed Results .................................................................................................. 78
8 ANNEX II: Fall 2010 Concertation Meeting ......................................................... 79
8.1
Questionnaire ...................................................................................................... 79
8.1
Detailed Results .................................................................................................. 81
8.2
IETF statistics ..................................................................................................... 82
9 ANNEX II: FISA Standardisation Support Group ................................................. 84
9.1
Existing pre-standardisation initiatives related to future internet ....................... 84
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The nextMEDIA Coordination Action aims to coordinate the efforts in Europe towards
producing a clear situation of the Future Media Internet (FMI). Especially in the
Networked Media area, the expected results are a) to inform the existing and evolving
project and project clusters about the FIA related activities, and to increase the
efficiency of the cross-clusters collaboration in FIA related issues.
This deliverable is the 3rd outcome of the WP2 ―Coordination of the activities of the
cluster towards the FIA‖. The current version of the deliverable D2.3 is an updated
version of D2.1 and D2.2. It is still a draft version, as the final will be delivered after the
Networked Media spring 2011 concertation meeting on 14-15 April 2011.
As compared to the previous versions (2.1 and D2.2), this deliverable includes the
results of the questionnaires and additional information about running projects. In order
to collect information about the running and new projects, a questionnaire will be
distributed on the 28th of November 2010, during the project presentation at the
concertation plenary session.
Disclaimer
This document contains material, which is the copyright of certain nextMEDIA
contractors, and may not be reproduced or copied without permission. All nextMEDIA
consortium partners have agreed to the full publication of this document. The
commercial use of any information contained in this document may require a license
from the proprietor of that information. The nextMEDIA Consortium consists of the
following companies:
No Participant name
1
2
3
4
5
6
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
ATOS Origin
Centre for Research and Technology Hellas
CREATE-NET
Queen Mary University of London
Synelixis Solutions Ltd
Participant
short name
UPM
ATOS
CERTH
CREATE
QMUL
Synelixis
Country
Coordinator
Contractor
Contractor
Contractor
Contractor
Contractor
Countr
y
Spain
Spain
Greece
Italy
UK
Greece
Table 1. Partners list
The information in this document is provided ―as is‖ and no guarantee or warranty is
given that the information is fit for any particular purpose. The user thereof uses the
information at its sole risk and liability.
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Acronyms
AQoS
BOF
CAS
CBIR
CBVIR
CDN
DPI
ETSI
FCN
FIA
FIArch
FISO
FMI
FMIA-TT
FMN
IETF
MANA
MDC
MVC
MVV
NQoS
OQoS
P2P
PQoS
RFC
QBIC
QoS
SQoS
SVC
UGC
VpD
Adaptation QoS
Birds Of a Feather session (IETF)
Content Aware Storage
Content-based image retrieval
Content-Based Visual Information Retrieval
Content Delivery Network
Deep Packet Inspection
European Telecommunications Standards Institute
Future Content Networks
Future Internet Assembly
Future Internet Architecture Group
Future Internet Service Offerings
Future Media Internet
Future Media Internet Architecture Think Tank
Future Media Networks cluster
Internet Engineering Task Force
Management and self-Aware Architectures
Multi Description Coding
Multi-View Video Coding
Multi-View Video Plus Depth
Network QoS
Objective QoS
Peer to peer
Perceived QoS
Request for Comments
Query By Image Content
Quality of Service
Subjective QoS
Scalable Video Coding
User Generated Content
Video Plus Depth
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1 Introduction
The nextMEDIA Coordination Action aims to coordinate the efforts in Europe towards
producing a clear situation of the Future Media Internet (FMI), create common pillars
(e.g. the Future Media Internet reference architecture for Europe) and support the results
of the developments of the European projects. In order to achieve these goals,
nextMEDIA realises the following actions:

Coordinate the research collaboration in networked media scientific fields,
especially in Future Media Internet (with strong orientation to the combination of
3D Internet Media and Content-aware Networks/Network-aware applications)

Support the cooperation and future research of the European projects in the field of
Networked Media by means of driving Task Forces and propose and coordinate new
ones (―Future Media Internet Architecture‖).

Identify the position and clear opportunities in the areas where the European
research in Future Media Internet is more competitive world-wide and develop
studies and roadmaps by means of analysing the situation, technology and patents in
the most developed countries in relevant research areas.

Create the necessary dissemination means to advertise and spread excellence of the
European research in Future Media Internet world-wide and attract the prominent
scientists and company managers to the events.
With respect to the abovementioned activities, the expected results are:

To inform the existing and evolving clusters about the FIA related activities, in
order to achieve their role in sharing the gained knowledge between the participants.

To increase the efficiency of the cross-clusters collaboration in FIA related issues,
via presentations, emails and off-line discussion, in the timeframe between the
Concertation meetings.
Increase the collaboration of the EU-funded projects with similar or complementary
National and International initiatives in areas related to FIA.
1.1 What is new in D2.3
This deliverable is the 3rd outcome of WP2 ―Coordination of the activities of the cluster
towards the FIA‖. It is based on D2.1 and D2.2 yet its content has been updated in
various sections.
First of all the structure has been changed and all references to relevant nation and EU
projects have been removed. Interested audience may refer to [123].
New sections related to social networks and business targets have been added.
Moreover, a new chapter has been added analysing the results of the Networked Media
Spring 2010 and Fall 2010 concertation meetings. As the Fall 2010 concertation
meeting was focused on the standardization efforts, a detailed analysis is provided. The
results of the Spring 2011 (which will take place on 14-15 April 2011), concertation
meeting will be added in a new version of the deliverable.
This deliverable is organized as follows. Chapter 2 provides for each cluster, the
relevant state of the art and the research challenges. Chapter 3 provides the business
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orientations and the targeted market sectors. Chapter 4 provides the results of the
concertation meetings questionnaires and analysis of Europe‘s contribution in IETF.
Annex I and II provide the questionnaires, the results and a relevant analysis.
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2 Current Research Challenges
Internet is today the most important information exchange mean. It is providing to the
society the mechanisms to create new forms of social, political and economical
intercourse. With the evolving role(s) of digital communication, a cognitive society
goes beyond information and content accumulation and consumerism by involving
conscious intellectual activity (as thinking, learning, reasoning, or remembering). For
this purpose, the Internet should support mechanisms for knowledge dissemination both
at local and global level. Knowledge and culture must be diffused worldwide to
breakdown barriers and to promote dissemination and learning.
In practice, this means that as digitalization of data progresses, it is expected that the
majority of new media will arrive in digital form, with the analogue form being the
exception. For instance, digital videos will not only increase in number, but also in size,
due to increases in resolution and the ease of creation and manipulation. Progress in
network multimedia communication is also leading to 3D videos. Several means
accelerate sharing of these new forms of digital media continue to appear (YouTube for
asynchronous video content being one of the well known pioneers in this space). Digital
TV channels are also progressively penetrating the Internet space, Zattoo and Joost, for
real time/streaming video content being pioneers in this space.
As such the Internet plays a crucial role in the ability of humans to communicate, but at
the same time opens new challenging problems. As the current Internet grows beyond
its original expectations (a result of increasing demand for performance, availability,
security, and reliability) and beyond its original design objectives, it progressively
reaches a set of fundamental technological limits and is impacted by operational
limitations imposed by its architecture.
In this chapter, we aim to collect and categorize the research challenges based on the
different Networked Media Unit clusters. In each cluster, we provide a short description
of the research in EC projects, then we provide a current state of the art section and we
conclude with the near and forthcoming research challenges.
2.1 Research Challenges in Media Delivery
The term ―Networked Media‖ implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D
graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed online through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and
so on, in a convergent manner. In the above context, Media Delivery Platform (MDP)
cluster aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the
transition to the Future of the Internet. Projects that fall in this cluster are more
networked oriented, that content creation oriented.
The main drivers in MDP are the use of the Internet as a common infrastructure for
interconnecting more than computing machines. While the focus of today's Internet is
mainly on elastic traffic (e.g. mainly Web/HTTP applications), bulk data transfers (e.g.
peer-to-peer applications) and multimedia streaming (e.g. Internet TV, gaming), it is
also expected that new applications will demand for new capabilities from the networks
(Figure 1). For instance, strict real-time communication, and reliable connectivity with
no information loss during failure scenarios are examples of high interest especially for
industrial applications. These place new demands on the network and transport layers
requiring new approaches and designs.
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Figure 1: Future Internet Traffic Properties [1]
However, as encoding, adaptation and streaming are associated, this cluster covers
research challenges not only in the area of “networking”, but also content encoding and
adaptation.
It should also be mentioned that MDP was renamed during the 5th FP7 Spring
concertation meeting to Future Media Networks (FMN) to better represent the actual
activities of the cluster.
References to relevant nation and EU projects in this topic may be found in [123].
2.1.1 Current State of the Art
Trying to abstract and group the research areas that the MDP/FMN projects aim to
advance, we may come up to three main subjects: the area of content-centric networks,
the area of multimedia encoding and the area of video adaptation. The state of the art in
these areas is summarised in the following sub-sections.
2.1.1.1 P2P and Content-Centric Networks
The technology in the field of distributed overlay streaming is evolving at a very rapid
pace. The potential advantages in terms of aggregated bandwidth, robustness and
scalability have spurred a significant body of R&D activities. The first generation of
P2P and overlay streaming systems includes several protocols that, in different amounts,
are directly derived from P2P file sharing protocols e.g. Narada builds a mesh overlay
topology that connects peers based on round-trip-time estimates; SplitStream improves
bandwidth usage employing multiple trees, allowing leaf nodes to contribute their
upstream bandwidth; a similar approach is taken by VidTorrent; Coolstreaming is
also largely based on file sharing protocols, and implements an algorithm that chooses
to download first the rarest chunks; finally popular large-scale systems such as SopCast
and PPLive are based on mesh overlays. Some projects like SEA and P2PNext have
introduced new multi-tree and mesh P2P protocols respectively.
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The last couple of years however, many research efforts and activities have already
targeted the approach of moving intelligence into the network. One of the rather shortterm initiatives is the ETSI TISPAN NGN (Next Generation Network). The NGN
approach includes a session control core that is based on the IMS and the SIP that
allows a horizontal integration of services. However, NGN efforts have been mainly
focused on the networking aspects needed to provide telephony, high-speed Internet
access and television and does not consider requirements related to content in a more
general way. Moreover, in NGNs, the roles of the network operators, content providers,
and end users are considered to be fairly static and not to leave enough room for tussle.
Moving towards modern content-aware networking activities, we can highlight the
following approaches: Active Networks can be viewed as an effort to augment data
packets with code fragments containing specialised processing logic for handling the
packet itself. While active networks are a very powerful paradigm, there have been
several drawbacks that have hindered their acceptance and wide spread deployment.
The primary concern is the security against active routers running malicious code
hidden in active packets. An equally important issue is that network operators prefer to
have complete control over their network.
In DONA (Data-Oriented Network Architecture) users can request named data from the
network by using the FIND primitive, while content providers can publish a data object,
which will be served to the users by using the REGISTER primitive. To support these
two primitives, DONA introduces resolution handlers, which forward content to the
users in an overlay manner. Similar to DONA, Siena (Scalable Internet Event
Notification Architectures) [1] features a generic scalable publish/subscribe eventnotification service. Siena formulates a general model of content-based addressing and
routing to maximize both expressiveness and scalability. PARC [5] launches a research
program named Assurable Global Networks (AGNs), where they focus on the point-tomultiparty or multiparty-to-multiparty information dissemination rather than traditional
point-to-point conversations. The main feature of content-centric AGNs is that the
security will reside in the data itself, not in the network channel as in today‘s Internet.
The network only concerns how to distribute the data and the publishers control the
security of the data. As a consequence, the content-centric network will be a huge
storage of authenticated data. OpenCDN [6]constructs an application level tree via relay
nodes that distribute the multimedia content. To coordinate relay nodes, OpenCDN
collects client-related information from relay nodes and decides the best relay node for a
newly joining client. Oscar [7]collects sampling information of key distribution during
the P2P overlay construction and uses that information to choose routes based on smallworld graphs. COCONET [8] aims to utilize semantic data tagging to provide content
level information for data streams flowing through a network. Last but not least,
Akamai's EdgePlatform [9] is a network of more than 40,000 secure servers with
proprietary software, aiming to optimize routes and replicate data dynamically to deliver
content and applications more quickly, reliably, and securely. Akamai‘s approach is to
eliminate long routes, by replicating and delivering content and applications from
servers close to end users.
2.1.1.2 Video Encoding
In recent years, there have been increasing developments in technologies for
transmission of multimedia content over Internet. When video is delivered to the user it
usually needs to traverse network paths with very different traffic capacities: from very
high bandwidth on dedicated glass fibre connections to very low bit-rate connectivity
for wireless transmissions. Furthermore, the same content needs to be accessible from a
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variety of devices at the user side, which have different displaying and computational
capabilities [10]. To tackle this challenge, the compression technology used in the
transmission system should ideally provide two important features; first, it has to be
highly efficient in terms of compression and second, it has to provide flexible, lowcomplexity, real-time content adaptation to the network and user‘s device properties.
Scalable Video Coding (SVC) [11][12][10] is a relatively recent approach to video
coding, which enables encoding of video content to produce a single scalable bit-stream
that can be seamlessly adapted to network or terminal properties while providing high
compression efficiency. A bit-stream is scalable if it is composed of a hierarchically
embedded family of content instances at different resolution levels. The underlying
multiresolution family of content instances should be embedded in the sense that when
looking at two different instances of the same content at two different resolution levels,
the two representations must match exactly over the extent of the lowest one. Any
instance of the content embraces all representations for lower resolutions. The
representation gets more accurate as the resolution increases. This allows very low
complexity of adaptation as lower resolutions can be extracted from a higher resolution
directly in the compressed domain, thus without performing computationally expensive
transcoding.
SVC: Three Scalability Dimensions
Temporal
Scaling
Combined spatial and temporal scaling
Spatial Scaling
Figure 2: Scalability dimensions in SVC
During the last two decades a significant amount of research has been dedicated to SVC
with the aim of developing the technology that would provide a low-complexity video
adaptation, but retain the comparable compression efficiency and decoding complexity
to those of conventional (non-scalable) video coding systems. This research evolved
from two main branches of conventional video coding: 3D wavelet and hybrid video
coding techniques. Although a hybrid based technology was chosen for standardisation
within MPEG, a great amount of research continued also on Wavelet-based Scalable
Video Coding (W-SVC). Several recent W-SVC systems have shown a very good
performance in different types of application scenarios, especially when fine granular
quality scalability is required. The approach presented in [11], performs a joint
optimization of a wavelet-based SVC (W-SVC) and a Forward Error Correction method
(FEC) based on Turbo Codes (TC) to provide a smooth delivery of video over Internet.
The JSCC scheme [13][14] minimizes the reconstructed video distortion at the decoder
subject to a constraint on the overall transmission bit-rate budget. The minimization is
achieved by exploiting the source Rate- Distortion (RD) characteristics and the statistics
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of the available codes. Here, the critical problem of estimating the Bit Error Rate (BER)
probability in error prone applications is also discussed. Regarding the error rate
statistics, not only the channel coding rate, but also the interleaver and packet size for
TCs are considered in the proposed approach. The aim is to improve the overall
performance of the underlying JSCC. In [15], a perceptually adaptive loop filtering
method is proposed for wavelet based SVC. Specifically, a new structure of in-loop
filtering is designed for SVC considering update step in MCTF. In [16], a novel method
for bitstream allocation is introduced. This method assumes that minimum R–D slope of
the same fractional bit-plane within the same bit-plane across different subbands is
higher than or equal to the maximum R–D slope of the next fractional bitplane across
different subbands. An analysis of different down-sampling filters in popular waveletbased scalable video coding schemes is presented in [17]. In addition to transmission
over internet, SVC is apt for an event driven application that may be potential
application for future internet.
Apart from SVC, Multi-View Video Coding (MVC) [20] has recently attracted a lot of
research. Compressing multi-view sequences independently is not efficient since the
redundancy between the closer cameras is not exploited. MPEG and VCEG groups
jointly created an ad-hoc group 3DAV [18], which received several contributions for
Multi-View coding. A good review on the proposed algorithms can be found in [19]. As
an output of this work, Multi-View Video Coding (MVC) is generated as an amendment
to H.264/AVC, exploiting temporal and inter-view redundancy by interleaving camera
views and coding in a hierarchical manner. The multi-view video codec based on
H.264/AVC exploiting the correlation between cameras in a backward compatible way
is proposed in [21]. Several prediction structures are proposed with the signalling in the
bitstream. Codec is based on baseline profile and using only P pictures. It showed
superior performance for dense cameras. First version of MVC extension of
H.264/AVC can be used for some applications such as real time video communication.
MVC is one of the first standards towards formal 3D encoding. In 2008, Nokia released
a baseline version of MVC, which is very similar to the codec with the adapted syntax
changes. Recently, Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) announced the ―Blu-ray 3DTM‖
specification, which calls for encoding 3D video using the MVC codec to be supported
by all Blu-ray Disc players. Usage of MVC will be more popular by upcoming new
specifications and streaming and error resilient tools based on MVC will be required for
transmission mediums. MPEG-C Part-3 [22] is the current standard to encode Video
Plus Depth (VpD) data by individually compressing video and depth data using
standard H.264/AVC [23]. Since depth data is much easier to encode rather than another
view, compression efficiency of VpD is better than MVC coded stereoscopic videos,
however image-based-rendered other view have artifacts due to occlusion. Another
advantage of VpD representation is to enable changing the distance between the
cameras while rendering other view.
In order to handle 45-view displays, Multi-View Video Plus Depth (MVV) and VpD
are not adequate. The solution to feed such systems is to decode a limited number of
views using MVC and then generate artificial views using interpolation techniques [24].
There are two important reasons for this approach. The first practical reason is the
problem of data acquisition. It is difficult to set up a mobile recording system that is
composed of fifty high definition cameras that are calibrated. The second reason is the
problem of data transmission. It is difficult to transmit even encoded data for fifty views
over the Internet. MVC provides significant compression gain but the result is still
linear with the number of views. Multi-view streaming systems use video+depth format
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to drive displays with high number of views [25]. Future display systems will use M
video signal and N depth maps. MPEG vision is a new 3D Video (3DV) format that
goes beyond the capabilities of existing standards to enable both advanced stereoscopic
display processing and improved support for auto-stereoscopic N-view displays, while
enabling interoperable 3D services. This is an ongoing task between MPEG working
groups.
2.1.1.3 QoS and Video Adaptation
Video adaptation is the third area of research today, related to the MDP/FMN projects.
Offering QoS-based services involves interactions, not only among a number of entities
along the content/service delivery chain, but also across different layers. To coordinate
effective adaptation and mapping of QoS parameters at service, application and network
layers, cross-layer interactions are required.
In order to measure and evaluate the QoS, a number of objective and subjective
methods have been proposed. A subjective evaluation of the quality of the content is
difficult due to various factors including time, cost and human perception. Strictly
speaking, subjective tests require a large number of tests operated under controlled
psychometric experimental conditions, to obtain statistically meaningful Mean Opinion
Scores (MOS), summarizing the Perceived QoS (PQoS). Obviously this is not a good or
even possible solution for real-time audiovisual services. As alternatives, objective
measurements are used by analyzing the signals in both compressed (e.g. MPEG4/H.264 compressed video stream) and non-compressed (e.g. reconstructed RGB video
as the output) formats.
As illustrated in Figure 3, from the end users‘ perceptual experience to adaptation
decision, a series of QoS are involved: Subjective QoS, Objective QoS, Network QoS
(NQoS), and Adaptation QoS (AQoS). However, more types of QoS (and PQoS) may
be defined in an end-to-end environment.
Figure 3: Subjective, Objective, Application, Network QoS
In a layered architecture, such as today‘s typical TCP/IP model, each layer has a set of
distinct mechanisms and associated parameters to fulfil its functionality. Table 2
classifies useful parameters and adaptation mechanisms by their respective layers.
Parameters presented in this table include both tunable and read-only parameters.
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Layers
Mechanisms (to optimize)
Parameters
User
User priority selection
Terminal characteristics, objective quality metrics
(e.g. PSNR, VQM, SSIM), Subjective quality
metrics (e.g. MOS, SAMVIQ, DSIS)
Application
Transrating, Transcoding, Forward
Error Correction (FEC), Automatic
Repeat Request (ARQ), Adaptive
encoding/decoding
Rate, Codec, Protection level
Transport
TCP Congestion Control, UDP, Header
Compression
Packet loss information, receiver window,
congestion window, retransmission timer
IP packet size, DiffServ Code Point, Handoff
information
Retransmission attempts, Error rate, retry limit,
MAC Protocols, Radio resource control,
Data Link
RTS/CTS, Handoff, Traffic classes, TDMA time
FEC, ARQ, Framing
slots, OFDM carriers
BER, signal strength, transmission power,
Physical
Channel modulation and coding
capability profile
Context
Dynamic Voltage Scaling, Scheduling
Battery status, Architectural capability profile
Information
Network
Packetization, DiffServ, TE
Table 2. Mechanisms and parameters at different layers
During the last couple of years however, it has been shown that adaptation techniques
limited to adaptation within a single layer are deficient in providing global optimal
setting for the system. In contrast, cross-layer approach has been extensively discussed
in recent research literature for its viability for providing better performance than
traditional layered architecture. Although cross-layer design emerged as a by-product of
recent proliferation of wireless networks having totally different properties from wired
networks, it offers various opportunities for heterogeneous environment, where a
variety of application types, network technologies and terminal capabilities are utilised.
A comprehensive framework that deals with content delivery and adaptation issues is
MPEG-21 [26]. All parts of MPEG-21 address a distinctive set of requirements, which
allow implementers of the standard to design and implement a system or application
that goes beyond simple multimedia content delivery in an interoperable way.
Though MPEG-21 describes a complete content delivery and adaptation framework, it
has turned out that only relatively small portions of the whole MPEG-21 framework
have been adopted by industry so far. This ultimately leads to the question whether
MPEG has addressed the requirements in a vital way and what needs to be done to
foster adoption of the MPEG-21 concepts on a broader scale. New approaches based on
SDP signalling have been proposed [27][28] to provide the required adaptation in the
network, without the need for the MPEG-32 signalling and communication overheads.
2.1.2 Research Challenges
Table 3 shows the running and newly started projects against the research areas that are
related to the FMI and are currently state of the art. Most running and newly started
projects of the Future Media Networks cluster (as is the new name of the Media
Delivery Platforms cluster) have in common that they use advanced networking
technologies including P2P, content/information overlays or content centric networking
technologies for optimal content adaptation, delivery and streaming.
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Content
Caching
Location
Awareness
Content Centric
Networking
New routing
protocol
New Signalling
New Transport
Protocol
P2P Topologies
P2P TV
Content
Adaptation
New Network
Architecture
Access /Core
Network
Home
Environment
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ADAMANTIUM
OPTIMIX
P2P Next
SEA
NAPA-WINE
iNEM4U
ALICANTE
COAST
COMET
CNG
ENVISION
Table 3. Comparison of Media Delivery Platforms Cluster projects
Looking into the future, research challenges that we may highlight are:
 Ever increasing Bandwidth. The Internet is growing and advancing in several
dimensions: the number of users, the amount and size of the content, the new media
and new services‘ traffic requirements. Thus, more bandwidth is needed in the endto-end path (from the server side, through the core, metro, access and body networks,
to the final user terminal) and new (e.g. P2P network-friendly) delivery methods are
required.
 Content adaptation & personalisation. The highly heterogeneous environment in
terms of diversity of user devices, (mobile) networks and user preferences will
remain. To ensure a real seamless access to new immersive applications, it is
desirable that the network itself and the services could automatically realise content
adaptation and enrichment inside the network. Moreover, mainly from the business
domain, substantial demand and significant challenge for the FMI will be required
for adaptation of encrypted and trusted content.
 Content Centric networks. Content-aware real-time transmission of future media
means that the relative importance of each packet towards increasing the end-to-end
utility function is established [3]. That is, the more important packets should be
better protected (by allocating appropriately network resources) or should be
transmitted first in a scheduling scenario.
 Content/Information driven routing. Internet routing system shall be capable to
consider associated routing information (e.g. meta-data) and metrics for path
calculation such as the link quality, security level, energy consumption, priorities or
location. Additionally, an efficient way of addressing groups of "users" by pointing
at (groups of) terminals/devices is required in many applications that rely on a oneto-many data exchanges.
 New architectures and overlay networks for content distribution. The main
research challenge related to new architecture is the (dynamic, autonomicity and selforganising) creation of overlay network infrastructures to support the provisioning of
media services to end-user communities. Some of the issues related to overlay
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networks have a wider impact and span, in fact, multiple areas. For instance the
specification and measurement of QoS parameters and other metrics that can be used
to assess the underlying communication technologies, achieve network friendliness
(via local caches), suggest most suitable service instances for the end-user. A
possible approach to deal with these cross-layer issues is to gather information from
the underlying networks and combine it with the higher level quality assessment and
requirements of applications to adjust the overlay networks.
 Quality of Experience. Quantification of QoE using objective and subjective
measures, remains a challenging research problem. While measures to predict and
evaluate the visual quality of uncompressed 3D video is itself an unsolved problem,
developing such measures in the presence of packet losses and other compression
artifacts is even more challenging and dependent on the specific display technology.
Furthermore, the relationship between network level QoS measures and overall QoE
must be studied.
 Identity, Trust, Privacy and Security. The content that is being produced and
distributed is increasing rapidly. Users expect to be able to take advantage of the
future widespread availability of multimedia content and access to virtual worlds. At
the same time, they need to feel confident that their security and privacy is being
protected. The increasing complexity and scale of future media systems will make
the problems of Identity, Trust, Privacy and Security harder to solve.
 Content Encoding. Multi-layered Scalable Video Coding (SVC) offers temporal,
spatial and quality scalability; Multi-view point Video Coding (MVC) allows for
different views of video streaming without drastically increasing the data rate;
Multiple Description Coding (MDC) offers an inherited resiliency mechanism with
improved PQoS when different sub-streams are received from independent physical
or logical paths. However, new media formats and encoding methods (also network
coding methods) to offer high definition (HD) selectable free-viewpoint content
coding and delivery, considering the evolution from H.264 2D SVC/MVC to scalable
HD 3D, Multiview Video plus Depth (MVD) and selectable free -viewpoint video
with interactive virtual panning/zooming. Moreover, new media formats that go
beyond video and sound to even other senses e.g. feeling, touching, sensing.
 In-network content enrichment. Novel methods for in-network content enrichment
and cross-network adaptation will be needed to allow for optimal use of available
resources and enriched QoE. By dynamically combining the inherited content
scalability (SVC different content layers, MVC different content views and MDC
different content descriptions) of the same resource (video stream), transmitted from
multiple sources (different servers or peers in case of P2P streaming) and/or received
over multiple diverse paths or networks (utilise the MDC features), on-the fly content
adaptation, inherited resiliency and enriched QoE may be achieved. Reconstruction
of the content segments may take place either within the network or at the edge of
the network (at content aware edge routers) offering transparent streaming to lowend terminals or at the terminal side in case multi-network connectivity is available.
Cross-network adaptation and in-network content enrichment especially in P2P
overlay topologies, will offer traffic adaptation (load balancing to avoid network
flooding), optimal use of available resources (bandwidth), and enriched QoE.
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2.2 Research Challenges in 3D Media
After having been confined to stand alone applications for long time, the use of 3D
visualization technologies in the representation of reality is now mature enough to
merge with internet applications. This trend can already be observed in some popular
applications such as Second Life or World of Warcraft and it is progressively changing
the way in which people will experience the future Internet. Furthermore, recent
technologies such as networks of embedded sensors and actuators immersed in the
physical environment appear now mature enough to overcome another limit to the
widespread acceptance of 3D Internet in the everyday life, which has been the lack of
suitable, non invasive interfaces letting the user to interact with the virtual world as if
she was immersed in the physical environment. For these reasons, although the use of
3D is currently limited to a few applications, it can be expected that most future internet
applications, such as e-mail, web browsing, VoIP, virtual shops, file sharing, social
networking etc… will rely on this technology. In this section FP6 - FP7 funded and
national projects related to 3D Media are analysed. This is followed by the revision of
the State of the Art in 3D Media.
References to relevant nation and EU projects in this topic may be found in [123].
2.2.1 Current State of the Art
In this section, we provide the current state of the art in 3D Caching and coding and in
interaction techniques and User Interfaces. MVV and VpD have already been
mentioned and will not be repeated in this section.
2.2.1.1 3D Cashing and Coding
The goal of 3D streaming is to deliver 3D content in real-time, so that immediate
interactions with the virtual world are possible [29]. Although several factors all affect
the streaming quality, the most important limitation has been the bandwidth. Model
simplifications and progressive transmissions have thus been used to deal with the
limited bandwidth [30]. Even though content streaming requires additional bandwidth,
it becomes less of a problem with better broadband networks. Prefetching techniques
[31] additional could reduce the potential delay users‘ experience. In fact, VE‘s based
on 3D streaming have already appeared, where terabytes of content are navigable via
progressive transmissions. In the long run, install-then-play may no longer be practical
or feasible, when the content becomes truly massive and dynamic or when VE‘s become
as numerous as the websites today. Current 3D streaming scheme may be classified into
four types: object streaming, scene streaming, visualisation streaming and image –
based streaming [32]. For scene streaming, as the users‘ field of view may not cover the
entire VE, downloading the entire scene is not necessary. Hesina and Schmalstieg [33]
proposed that user can use a circular AOI, and keep consistency of only the objects with
in AOI. Additionally, if users just rotate views but do not move, the objects within the
AOI need not be re-acquired. Some streaming may roughly be divided into two stages:
object determination and object transmission [34]. The first stage determines which
objects are visible given a user‘s view. The second stage decides the transmission order
of objects based on visibility or the importance of the objects.
One of the recent trends in contemporary computer graphics application is the
application of more and more polygons in order to increase image (or object) realism
[35]. This trend is particularly fuelled by recent developments in graphics hardware,
particularly the appearance of the GPU on low-end display adaptors. This means that
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graphics adaptor not only performs scan conversion but also the 3D geometric
projections and shading operations. While rendering a typical 3D mesh on a per-triangle
basis, each vertex participates in six triangles on an average. Processing a cached vertex
can be significantly faster than processing an uncached vertex. Thus, to maximise
benefit from the cache, the mesh triangles and associated vertices must be rendered in
an order, which somehow preserves locality. This ordering is called mesh rendering
sequence. A good rendering sequence will minimize the average number of cache
misses per triangle. 3D meshes are usually specified, for example in the ASCII VRML
2.0 file format, as a list of triangle in an arbitrary order, where each triangle is specified
as three indices into a list of vertices. Simple minded renderers send these triangles to
the graphics pipeline in the order specified in the file, hence achieve mediocre rendering
performance. More sophisticated renderers use the trianalge strips technique, which
renders the triangle mesh using a FIFO vertex cache of size 2, which is a standard part
of legacy 3D hardware. Algorithms to generate triangle strips were described by Xiang
et al [36] and Stewart et al [37]. However, due to the limited size of the cache, it is
provably not possible to reduce the error rate below 1.0. Deering [38] first proposed a
hardware model where a larger vertex cache is allowed, which the author termed as
generalised triangle meshes, but did not supply algorithms to generate the appropriate
rendering sequences. Chow later provided algorithm, along with Bar-Yehuda and
Gotsman [39] and Lin and Yu [40].
If a client can provide unbounded disk storage and wait for a possibly very long
preloading time, it is possible to transmit all virtual objects in the environment to the
client before starting the interaction in the VE [41]. This approach is adopted by some
existing distributed walkthrough systems. However, a more realistic situation is that the
available cache storage and preloading time are limited. Furthermore, preloading a large
section of a database would saturate the network with unnecessary traffic, depriving
other clients of their service. To avoid this bandwidth over-utilisation, CyberWalk [41].
employs cache replacement policy to retain only frequently accessed objects in the
cache and prefetching mechanisms to prefetch only potentially visible objects in order
to reduce access and rendering latency. Various cache replacement policies have been
proposed and their suitabilities in a conventional database system have been examined.
Policies such as Least Recently Used (LRU) and Least Reference Density (LRD) are
being used widely. These policies are derived from their counterpart in operating system.
In the context of databases, the Most Recently Used (MRU) policy is also occasionally
adopted to cater for cyclic data access behaviour. These policies are all page – based,
due to the logical mapping made by the database or operating system to the physical
storage. In general, the performance of individual replacement policies is sensitive to
the characteristics of queries initiated. A general conclusion on the performance of the
replacement policies cannot be made. In practice, replacement policy is often
approximated by the LRU policy in conventional caching [42]. In [43], authors argue
that LRU policy is not appropriate in a context where objects accessed by a client might
change over time. Rather, the semantics of data access is more important in defining the
replacement policy.
2.2.1.2 Interaction techniques and User Interfaces
Although many interactive computer graphics systems are now able to render high
quality shaded 3D models in real time, there remains a problem of how to interact with
virtual environments in natural and error-free manner. The 3D user interface, the add-on
application that would give users access to the technology‘s benefits, is a critical part of
the 3D Web. A number of 3D interaction techniques have been developed by various
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researchers during the past decade. A comprehensive and recent overview is given by
Bowman in [44]. Currently user interaction (UI) techniques in virtual environments are
usually implemented on the application level. Given the possibility to create complex
tracking behaviour directly on the tracking middle level, the idea to implement 3D user
interface techniques on that higher level becomes quite obvious. A uniform approach
for specifying mixed reality interfaces, including 3D UI techniques was recently
published by Figueroa et al. [45]. In this ambitious attempt to describe components of
3D user interfaces, a formal specification model and a corresponding XML based
description language including pseudo code were introduced. This Interface Component
Description Language (ICDL) seems not to be suitable for direct implementation. The
current focus of development on ICDL appears rather to be on theoretical specification
than on practical implementation. VRPN (Virtual-Reality Private Network) [46] is one
of the most well known and popular device-independent and network transparent
frameworks for peripheral devices used in MR systems. It supports a wide variety of
input devices and different types of data such as 6DOF pose data, button states,
analogue values, incremental rotations and more. OpenTracker [47] is an open software
architecture that provides another framework for the different tasks involving tracking
input devices in MR applications. It is an appropriate framework to integrate 3D User
Interface techniques directly in middleware.
Tabletop displays have the potential to bring the advantages of electronic media to the
type of interactions that occur over traditional desktops, and software environments like
―BumpTop‖ [48] greatly enhance the reality of interaction through physics modelling.
Almost all windowing interfaces currently use shallow 3D effects to support interaction.
The layering and shadowing effects both enhance the visual appeal of the interfaces and
provide a natural metaphor for switching documents and workspaces into and out of
focus. Some commercial interfaces further extend the 3D effects, using animations to
clarify feedback effects such as distorting windows and icons to show the relationship
between pre- and post-action states (Mac OS®X). Researchers are also investigating
problems and solutions that arise from moving between layers on the desktop.
Dragicevic [49] describes 3D visuals of dog-ears, folding and shuffling to make
working with overlapping windows more intuitive. Agarawala and Balakrishnan‘s
―BumpTop‖ [48] adopts the emulation of reality on the desktop, using both rich 3D
visuals and physics modelling to enrich interaction so that objects can be piled on top of
one another, flipped onto their backs or thrown at others, and the visual effects of
collisions depends on their mass and velocity. Stahl and Lundberg‘s [50] tabletop 3D
virtual pond floats items in use to the surface and allows items to sink when they are no
longer in active use. The Lumisight table [51] and Nakashima et al.‘s 3D table [52]
provide up to four users with a coherent view of a 3D image in the centre of the display.
While these systems are capable of rich 3D visuals in a collaborative setting, they do
not fully address the interaction with these 3D models. Furthermore, these systems
require a very large tabletop to achieve a small central 3D display. More efficient
interaction techniques that provide control of all types of 3D rotation coupled with
translation (6DOF) on a direct-touch tabletop display are presented in [53].
2.2.1.3 Virtual Reality/Virtual Worlds
Virtual reality (VR, also called virtual environments, VEs) is an important technology
that invites 3D interaction because of its inherently spatial nature. Initially, many of the
interfaces to VR applications were designed to be ―natural‖ – e.g. to view a virtual room
the user walked around it or to examine virtual objects the user picked up directly with a
hand. Recent 3D internet browser-based interfaces create an instant virtual places from
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web pages, creating a new universe of inter-connected worlds for users to visit, explore,
and meet people (Figure 4) [54][55]. Only in recent years have research groups been
attempting to connect Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and virtual worlds. However,
several impressive prototypes already exist that enable users to navigate in virtual
scenes or manipulate virtual objects solely by means of their cerebral activity, recorded
on the scalp via electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes. Meanwhile, VR technologies
provide motivating, safe, and controlled conditions that enable improvement of BCI
learning as well as the investigation of the brain responses and neural processes
involved.
Figure 4: 3D browser-based virtual world
Interactions with VE can be decomposed into elementary tasks [44] such as navigating
to change the viewpoint or selection and manipulation of virtual objects [56]. In virtual
worlds, current BCI systems can let users change the camera position in a VE toward
the left or right by using two different brain signals, such as left- or right-hand motor
imagery (MI) or two steadystate visual-evoked potentials (SSVEPs) at different
frequencies [57]. MI-based BCIs have also been used to explore a virtual bar [70] or
move along a virtual street [58]. The connection between BCIs, videogames, and VR
technologies offers a promising research area for the next user interaction systems.
A relevant aspect related to the adoption of 3D media applications regards their
usability and the quality of experience perceived by users. Indeed the quality of
experience when interacting with such kind of environments depends strongly on the
effort that users make to engage in the applications due to the required cognitive load to
process ―unnatural‖ 3D interfaces. In fact different approaches for minimizing the
cognitive load are under study such as the use of motion constraints in 3D environments
for providing navigation guidance [59]. This approach in addition to taking away some
of the bewildering freedom that causes the high cognitive load in the first place, also has
the benefit of supporting the user maintaining an accurate cognitive map if the path is
designed to visit all of the important landmarks of the environment. Other approaches
based on use of table-top augmented reality environments obtained relevant results for
evaluating the ability to complete tasks in 3D when compared to 2D. In general, it was
identified that that 3D objects contain more information about themselves and their
relative position in space than 2D objects, although users take longer to process this
information they are more accurate when searching and retrieving 3D objects [60].
Besides navigation and task execution, recent research has focused on the QoE of
interaction for manipulation of 3D environments [61]. Previous studies have identified
that in general a change in the input devices for manipulating 3D environments
influenced perceived control but not the perception of the actual environments [62]. In
this sense, recent research is exploring different input/output modalities within 3D
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environments including tangibles [63], mobile [64] or even combination of modalities
to provide research interactions or enable impaired users [65].
2.2.2 Research Challenges
3DTV
HOLOVISION
MUTED
PlayMacer
VirtualLife
MOBILE3DTV
3D4YOU
Digital holography
HELIUM3D
3DPRESENCE
2020 3D Media
i3DPost
3DLife
3DPHONE
Real3D
3D VIVANT
DIOMEDES
FascinatE
MUSCADE
SkyMedia
Table 4. Comparison of 3D Media Cluster projects
Looking into the future, research challenges that we may highlight are:
 3D Content Capturing. For 3D content capturing, 3D capture techniques (including
multi-view capture) are still being developed, and more work is needed both on the
capture methods themselves, but also on the methods of data representation and
compression to allow transmission over different kinds of networks and reproduction
on different display devices. In parallel, optimum methods of surround sound capture
need to be determined, to produce a sound field well-matched to the immersive
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Virtual Worlds
3D Immersive
Environment
3D
Teleconference
Mobile 3D
3D QoS
3D TV &
Cinema
New Media
Formats
3D Network
Caching
3D Networking
Multimodal
Capturing
3D Delivery
Format
Films & Games
3D Display
Technology
Table 4 shows the running ands newly started projects against the research areas that are
related to the FMI and are currently state of the art. Most running and newly started
projects of the 3D Media cluster have in common that they use 3D Display, modeling,
capturing and delivering issues, targeting application such as 3D TV, Games and
Immersive Environments/Virtual worlds.
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visual experience. Research is also needed to explore the benefit that may be
achieved by adding new modalities such as smell and haptics.
 3D Content creation/rendering. Research is needed on the engineering methods
and tools to support fast and easy 3D content creation, along with optimum methods
for capturing the visual appearance of the real world, including 3D/multiview, high
dynamic range and high frame rate. For the 3D content creation, one of the recent
trends is the application of more and more polygons in order to increase image (or
object) realism via contemporary computer graphics applications. However, better
rendering systems are needed or better rendering sequences in order to minimize the
average number of cache misses per triangle.
 3D Content compression & coding. The access to the FMI content should be
supported anywhere, anytime and using any terminal. Thus, the 2D/3D media
content should be extensible and scalable, in other terms it should be adaptable to
various usage environments and available to a wide range of users. Similarly, 3D
audio content should also be rendered in the best possible way to give the user the
sensation of 3D immersive experience although his/her terminal may not be capable
of rendering the 3D content. Therefore, it is important to generate the FMI content
in a scalable manner during either its capture or compression stage. Cross-modality
(e.g., video, audio, text etc) and multi-sensory (i.e., new modalities for sensory,
olfactory information) aspects of the original content should also be provided
interchangeably, so as to make the FMI services extensible to various network
conditions, terminal features, user preferences etc, and thus available to all.
 3D User Interfaces. Future 3D rich multimedia interfaces will be needed to support
the novel input modalities and the envisioned interactive applications. As we witness
a shift from graphical interfaces to multimedia interfaces, developing richer and
more intelligent interfaces is a key challenge to the adoption of the envisioned
applications. Such interfaces will give more flexibility to the use by offering a choice
of modalities depending on the nature of the information conveyed. Finally,
multimedia user interfaces provide the adaptability needed to effectively operate in
changing operating conditions.
 3D navigation with physical and emotional involvement of the user. As an
extension to the previous challenge, novel 3D navigation methods will be needed
able to take into account not only the audiovisual, but also new types of haptic
feedback and user‘s emotional involvement. During real world navigation the user is
primarily guided by the audio and visual channel, but in the future the advancement
in portable haptic interfaces will allow receiving new types of feedbacks. The
interaction of the user with the navigation support will become hands free, with the
possibility of tracking the gestures performed around the user's space, customizing or
modifying the navigation process. Emotional involvement will imply the
reconsideration of the 3D rendering process, which will integrate realism with nonreal rendering of objects, users cues, and actions, in order to enhance the expressive
and emotional communication within a community sharing the virtual/mixed
environment.
 Virtual Worlds/Virtual Characters creation. The creation of virtual worlds and
virtual characters with emotion and personality will increase the realism and quality
of interaction such as in games, story-telling systems, interactive dramas, training
systems and therapy systems. Emotion is another major component of personification
since in real life emotions affect all a person‘s cognitive processes, their perceptions,
beliefs and the way they behave.
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2.3 Search and retrieval of multimedia content
Retrieving multimedia networked content (audio, images, 3D and videos) from the web
is becoming a major use of Internet these last few years. This is confirmed by the
growing popularity of social networks, content sharing and custom user generated
content. However, the multimedia retrieval challenge is not efficiently addressed and
the relevance of returned results is not satisfying. The main reason to explain the latter
is in the algorithms used to perform multimedia search. In fact, most existing systems
for retrieving images, music, videos, 3D, etc. rely on text-based retrieval algorithms
applied on textual description of the considered multimedia content. In the web, this
textual description is often built from a window of k words preceding and following the
multimedia content in the html code of the container. Most of images and videos search
engines (Google image, Exalead Image and Video, Yahoo image, etc) are based on this
technique. The main limitation of this technique is that the textual description found in
the web for an image or a video is not necessarily informative about the effective
content. In addition to this, multimedia content has specific features that cannot be
represented by a set or bag of words (texture for image, descriptor of videos, etc).
In this section FP6 - FP7 funded and national search related projects are analysed. Then,
a revision of the SoA in multimedia search is given. Finally this section concludes with
the provisional research challenges (for a complete analysis of the search related
projects can be found at www.ist-chorus.org/).
References to relevant nation and EU projects in this topic may be found in [123].
2.3.1 Current State of the Art
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), also known as query by image content (QBIC)
and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) is the computer vision problem
for image retrieval, that is, the searching of digital images in large databases based on
their content information. The underlying search algorithms vary depending on the
application, but result images should all share common elements with the provided
example, which can be either a pre-existing image supplied by the user, or a rough
approximation (sketched) of the image. Many algorithms have been presented in the
past based on different image criteria (e.g. texture, contour [73] and colour [74])
depending on the application and the dominant content of the image database. Recently,
the research community has focused on the combination of the existing low-level
approaches with semantic information in order to increase the retrieval accuracy.
Metadata semantics have been proven to be a very effective and supportive tool for
traditional and image-based search engines.
Regarding Content-Based Video Retrieval, if we look at TRECVID benchmark as
reference, we can see that most of the techniques are generally based on frame
descriptions techniques to extract visual concepts. Some recent scalable techniques
based on temporal and dynamic information are also adapted to videos:
 Key-frames strategies. In [75], two types of elliptical affine co-variant regions are
used to describe the image contents of key-frames. Each region is represented by a
128-dimensional vector using the SIFT descriptor developed by Lowe [76]. These
descriptors are post-processed in order to build a ―visual vocabulary‖. The objective
of this post-processing is to vector quantize the descriptors into clusters representing
the visual words as for text retrieval. Each descriptor for a new frame of the movie is
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associated to visual words. The final representation of video is a set of key frames,
and each key frame is represented by the visual words and their position. This
strategy allows retrieving objects in videos. This type of technologies could be
efficient to track objects, sets and people in a video or a set of videos. In [77] the
used local features are based on an improved version of the Harris point detector and
a set of local jets computed in the neighbourhood of each interest point. This type of
descriptors has a limited robustness for scale changes and is not invariant to rotation.
However, they have the advantage to be very discriminative, robust to localization
errors and require a low computational cost. This makes them very efficient for
content-based copy detection tasks. The technique fits well for hundreds of
thousands hours of videos and is then very adapted for the scalability issue.
 Spatio-temporal interest points. Instead of detecting points of interest in keyframes, Ivan Laptev and Tony Lindeberg have extended the concept of points of
interest in the spatiotemporal space These spatiotemporal points of interest have been
combined with different types of descriptors and have been used to recognize types
of activities [78] and applied to video copy detections [79]. Spatiotemporal points
have the advantage to characterize very salient patterns and are thus adapted to
describe temporal events. Moreover, this saliency is very efficient for the video copy
detection. However, such method makes difficult the process of very large catalogues
of videos, because the computational costs are very high.
 Interest points trajectories. New descriptions of video sequences, based on the
dynamic content have been proposed. In [80] an equivalent indexing strategy is
proposed, but using two different kinds of local features (Local jets around Harris
points and Symmetry points) and an asymmetric feature extraction strategy. Interest
point trajectories are efficient to describe the dynamic contents of the video
sequences. Moreover, the dynamic information is estimated with the trajectories of
the interest points that allow compressing temporal information, contrary to the
method founded on the dense optic flow. However, this strategy requires computing
the interest points on each frame of video sequences, which induces high
computational costs. This could be a bottleneck when the aim is to process a very
large catalogue of videos.
3D object search and retrieval is a relatively new and very challenging research field
and a major effort of the research community has been devoted to the formulation of
accurate and efficient 3D object search and retrieval algorithms. The existing 3D object
retrieval methods can be classified into four main categories: histogram-based,
transform-based, graph-based, view-based and, finally, combinations of the above.
Despite the numerous advantages and shortcomings of each category, it has been proven
experimentally that the best retrieval performance can be achieved through the
transform-based or the view-based approaches.
Transform-based methods are employed either on the surface [81][82][83] or on the
volume [84][85][86] of a 3D model. The outcome is usually a multidimensional
descriptor vector representing the global shape characteristics of the 3D object. In order
to address partial shape retrieval problems, a move from the global shape description to
a local representation of the shape characteristics is needed. In this case, graph-based
solutions are preferred [87], which are able to encode geometrical and topological shape
properties in a more faithful and intuitive manner. The drawbacks of the graph-based
methods are that it is difficult to implement them, they do not generalize easily to all 3D
shape representation formats and they require dedicated matching schemes. A more
comprehensive solution is given by 2D view-based methods, which can adequately deal
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with partial shape retrieval, while at the same time they achieve high retrieval accuracy
in global shape retrieval tasks[88].
A great interest for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) emerged in recent years. The
very successful series of International Conferences on Music Information Retrieval,
coordinated by ISMIR (http://www.ismir.net), bears witness of such interest from both
industry and academia. Different important research challenges are addressed in this
community, from ―query by humming‖ to the classification of audio based on musical
genres. As for identification of audio features contributing to explain music content, we
may identify timbral related features, rhythmic related features, and pitch related
features. Audio data that are to be classified cannot be represented as raw audio sample
data, therefore some sort of parameterisation is required, based on audio analysis.
Several methods such as Fourier transform, wavelet transform, statistical methods, etc.
are available in the literature. Examples of features based on timbre are spectral centroid,
spectral roll off, and time domain zero crossing, which measure the spectral shape, the
changes in spectral shape and the noisiness of a signal respectively. Other features, such
as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), also based on the STFT and borrowed
from speech processing, are typically used. Beat features extraction is another important
component. Overviews on beat tracking methods are available in the literature (e.g.
Dixon). Another important category of musical audio features is related to the gesture
and movement which is alluded in the music signal: early research results are available
in the literature (see for example the ―danceability‖ measure of a music signal
developed at MTG-PFU, Barcelona by the group of Xavier Serra).
For a complete state-of-the art please visit [89].
2.3.1.1 Search and retrieval of multimedia using real-world data
The discovery and utilization of sensors technology have made possible the efficient
collection of real time data. The availability of this data adds a new dimension to a wide
range of applications. A quite promising aspect of taking advantage of available sensor
data is semantic annotation of multimedia (image, video, sound) with context metadata.
Context metadata include spatial and temporal information such as the spatial region
and temporal interval contained within a video. Space and time metadata can be
provided by associating each video with the spatial and temporal coordinates of the
corresponding sensor at a particular location and time. For example, spatial and
temporal information such as the spatial region and temporal interval related to a video
could be used for a more efficient discovery and retrieval of video files within a specific
time interval or geographic location. Space and time metadata can be provided by
associating each video with the spatial and temporal coordinates of the corresponding
sensor at a particular location and time.
An approach of annotating video sensor data with spatial, temporal, and thematic
semantic metadata is presented in [90]. The developed prototype provides an
environment for the discovery and retrieval of videos by semantic temporal concepts
such as within, contains, or overlaps when querying with an interval of time. It
incorporates the standardization efforts of the OGC and W3C.
In [91] is studied how a sensor-rich world can be exploited by digital recording devices
such as cameras and camcorders to improve a user‘s ability to search through a large
repository of image and video files. The developed ―SEVA‖ system captures a stream of
sensor data and a video stream and fuses them together in a series of stages.
Augmented recording is a foundational component for the UCLA Hypermedia Studio's
research into the use of sensor networks in film and video production. During a filming
of a scene, sensor data such as light intensity, color temperature and location are
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collected and synchronized with each film or video frame. Later, editors, graphics artists
and programmers can view this data in synchronization with film and video playback.
ContextCam [92], is a prototype of a consumer video camera that provides point of
capture annotation of time, location, person presence and event information associated
to recorded video. Both low- and high-level metadata are discovered via a variety of
sensing and active tagging techniques, as well as through the application of machine
learning techniques that use past annotations to suggest metadata for the current
recordings. As far as the environmental monitoring is concerned, many types of sensors
have been developed and used for a plethora of purposes. An initial categorization of
sensor types could be physical, biological and chemical [93] .
2.3.1.2 Meta and multi-domain search
Merging, integrating and unifying search results from several data sources are far from
being novel. Many systems and approaches have been proposed in early 90‘s. One
major approach was the development of meta-search bots on top of existing search
engines and on-line databases. The main idea was to build a unique interface that takes a
user query as input and submits it to the integrated search engines. The results are
collected, processed and re-ranked to present the most ―relevant‖ hits. Duplicate hits
and dead links are discarded from the returned results to the user query. Meta-search
systems do not store, index and cache documents and no feedback is given to the
integrated search engines.
MetaCrawler [94][95], Harvest [96], SoftBot [97], SavvySearch [98] and MetaSpider
[99] are the main academic solutions based on the meta-search paradigm. Meta-search
engines rely on the HTML interface or the dedicated search API (when this exists) of
the integrated search services. They are therefore independent from internal
implementation of the integrated search services (index structures, formats, etc.).
However, a meta-search engine is strongly depending on the API of the integrated
search services. Integrating a new service implies the development of new custom adhoc communication components like HTML parsers to extract hits or custom code to
address APIs of search services. These components have to be updated, usually by hand,
at every search service API or interface changes. This is a very limiting factor to build
robust search applications.
On the other hand, the approach that consists on unifying results coming from different
search engines is not as promising as one could expect. Indeed, since the meta-search
engines do not index the data themselves, they are lacking of a set of useful information
that allows them to produce a relevant ranking, like the content of the hits, the web
graph surrounding the hits, the context of the user query, etc. The merging process
relevance is then often lowered by the lowest quality of the integrated search services.
2.3.2 Research challenges
Growth of popularity of media is not accompanied by the rapid development of
networked media search technologies. The most popular media services in the Web are
typically limited to textual search. This method of searching is not entirely natural for
humans. If we are performing a search in the real life, we do not only query by
providing a spoken or textual description of the searched item or service. We provide
examples: ―Do you have a jacket, like this one, but dark green, rather than orange?‖;
―Could you please give me a haircut, like the one in the catalogue?‖ This allows us to
omit long and unnecessary description of the searched item. Such services are nowadays
available in the Web only in form of low scale client-server test-beds and are not
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Personalised
Searches
P2P Searching
Mobile
Networks
Distributed
Searching
Cross-Media
Indexing
Text /
Semantics
Video
3D
Image
Speech / Audio
present in P2P1.
DIVAS
PHAROS
RUSHES
SAPIR
SEMEDIA
TRIPOD
VICTORY
VIDI-VIDEO
VITALAS
PetaMedia
i-Search
LivingKnowledge
COAST
Glocal
Table 5. Overview of multimedia search engines in 9 FP6-IST projects
Taking into account the past and current research in the EC along with the current stateof-the art, we can identify the following research challenges:

New ways of information representation including multimedia & things &
context & device type & user‘s intention. This means that a convergence
provisioned in the context of FI with respect to Internet of Content (IoC), Internet
of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS) should be also applied to search
creating completely novel applications like search in Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), in multimedia social networks, in 3D virtual
worlds and so on.

Extraction (in real time) and interpretation of multimedia and multiparty
communication (speech, posture, gesture). The latter implies the need for novel
methods for efficient interaction with content which in turn could lead the research
into:
o Novel interoperable interfaces able to describe and enable easy retrieval and
access by users to multimedia content under a context-aware and user-centric
framework.
o Analysis of the users behaviour with respect to contextual information, in
order to optimise the search and query techniques, taking into consideration
customisable UIs, and retrieve the most appropriate multimedia for the
specific user, with main emphasis on location-based data acquisition

1
Automatic, content-based large scale multimedia indexing, which implies the need
for new algorithms able to automatically extract, understand, classify and store
discriminative features in a centralised or distributed manner
Please note that project COAST objectives fit in more than one clusters
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
Unification of multimedia content search combining real world information and
social descriptions into one single descriptor (mixed multimedia search) able to
integrate:
o intrinsic properties of the content (static features such as shape, colour,
texture, dimension, etc.);
o dynamic properties (temporal descriptors, how it behaves, in which activities
it is normally used, who uses it, etc.);
o non-verbal expressive and emotional descriptors;
o social descriptors (how content is related to users, social/collaborative use of
the content)
The above mentioned research challenges could lead to a new era in search and retrieval
applications, however, the plethora of search services should intelligently managed by
adopting methodologies from the IoS with respect to automatic service discovery,
assessment and use following a ―white box‖ approach. Last but not least, of paramount
importance is the need for the creation and use of search benchmarking systems, which
would cover all critical aspects, including the user perceived quality.
.
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2.4 Research
Networks
Challenges
in
User
Centric
Media/Social
In the last years, the role of end users in multimedia landscape has been becoming more
and more active. All began with the explosion of the user generated content in the
World Wide Web, which meant a great deal of opportunities for end users to cooperate
in the development of Internet: forums to participate in, blogs to create in everyone‘s
own way, content being uploaded to video portals, games to play with people from over
the world, are only some examples of the great deal of possibilities of the User Centric
Media over the Internet. One of the names used was ―Web 2.0‖, which meant a change
in philosophy on Internet and a new focus on end users, who get not only a major
participation, but also they became the main role. Focusing on media, this has generated
the phenomenon called User Centric Media.
User control has great advantages for end users, since it allows them to have a much
more personalized access to the multimedia information. The great variety of user
genated content open need research needs on different domains. For example, user‘s
preferences to select the more relevant pieces of user generated content according to
their profiles. Moreover, it also poses some relevant challenges for the Media industry
when having to adapt the Media value chain to the new user control and the new role of
users as content creators. This fact involves new business models far from the
traditional broadcasting approaches [100].
References to relevant nation and EU projects in this topic may be found in [123].
2.4.1 Current State of the Art
As it can be seen, projects related to User Centric Media have some properties in
common. Some of them deal with 3D technologies or new networking structures,
whereas others are more focused on the content itself and the ways in which distribute it.
The specific parts to describe the current state of the art (not covered by other sections
of the document) are those related to three main subjects: User Preferences & Profiles,
Collaborative User Generated Content and User Generated Virtual Worlds.
2.4.1.1
User Preferences & Profiles
Due to the change of the user role in the Internet, their preferences are one of the most
worthy information to be used to provide new media tailored contents and services. In
order to select which resources are needed to build the user‘s profile which will
determine the actions that a user-focused system should perform. To elaborate the user
profile, the most convenient way is to analyze the user behaviour when consuming and
interacting with content.
The automatic electronic data gathering and analysis, has been used in Internet
environments normally for Internet usage measurement. This is not directly applicable
but useful for the statistical modelling of the user behaviour data. In [110] the authors
describe some methods for Internet user behaviour analysis based on access traces and
its application to discover communities based on a self-similarity model. Other authors
[111][112] extract the audience information and user‘s interest from the routine visits
and web log data. An interesting method is in [114] for inferring identity from user
behaviour using Bayesian statistics applicable to TV program consumption. Other
interesting methods are those using classifying algorithms, such as binary classifiers
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[102], or Bayesian classifiers, which allow to create a user‘s profile through feedback
analyzing the user‘s behaviour [103].
Another widely deployed systems are the recommendation systems for context-aware
content [115] which are based on content filtering tools. Techniques such as contentbased filtering, collaborative filtering and hybrid methods use the information on
content consumption as the input and feedback for their system characterisation.
Collaborative filtering is interesting for its applicability to IPTV scenarios and media
delivery over the Internet.
In collaborative filtering two kinds of algorithms are normally used: memory-based
approaches [116] and model-based approaches. In memory-based approaches the
prediction of the rating is made on the basis of the ratings of other users with similar
interests. This can be applied to consumption in communities or for community
discovery. Model-based collaborative filtering techniques [117] first learn a statistical
model and then predict the ratings based on the model learned. Hybrid methods have
been proposed [118] using the content assets to improve the rating prediction, and
traditionally have been used mainly for dealing with textual information. However,
hybrids methods using visual information are just starting but with very promising
results [115].
Other source of information about user preferences are the queries in search engines
bars. Users‘ profile can be created from the information extracted from those queries, as
well as the links which the user visits afterwards, since each of them represents a subject
in which the user is interested. This has been used in some applications, for example to
distinguish the response to the same query to be given to different users requiring a
different response according to their profile [101].
Now, with the increase of amount of multimedia information needed to organise and
classify, it is going to emerge many new applications of this, such as preference of the
user in TV at choosing TV programmes or movies on TV.
2.4.1.2
Collaborative User Generated Content
The term User Generated Content refers to the type of media content produced by end
users. Nevertheless, there is not an official definition for this term, so the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has proposed three main
characteristics [104]:
 Publication requirement: UGC has to be published in some context, such as a
website or a social networking.
 Creative effort: it is important that the information is provided from personal
knowledge of the user.
 Creation outside of professional routines and practices: usually UGC is
generated without expectation of remuneration.
There is a wide range of applications, mainly containing text or images such as blogs,
wikis, discussion boards, social networks, photo sharing sites, location systems, trip
planners, etc. but perhaps in media the videos exchanged in web-sites are the most
popular.
With the advent of Web2.0, user generated content is shared in an increasing number of
ways. The collaboration in generating content started from communities writing blog
describing their daily lives with text and photos. But day by day sharing personal photos
and videos, some of them user generated, some of them as a result of the professional
videos edited by a user, is becoming more and more popular on the Internet. As an
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example, with the convergence of mobile, blogging and geolocational technologies, the
mobile applications of user generated content are increasing [105].
2.4.1.3
User Generated Virtual Worlds
As a more advanced and sophisticated subject than the previous one, the term User
Generated Virtual Worlds refers to the creation of not only sites for sharing knowledge,
but also a completely parallel world in which users can interact and cooperate with other
members of it. There is a great deal of applications increasing day by day, such as
entertainment, education, training, e-commerce or business. Virtual worlds are a
paradigm of development of media centred on users, since a virtual environment is
mostly designed for satisfying the preferences of a specific user. In these systems, users
are completely involved, physically and emotionally.
The professional generated virtual worlds are normally computer generated or
reconstructing scenes with digital cameras and scanners. To generate user virtual worlds,
it is needed to use low-cost cameras (e.g. web cameras or cameras mounted on mobile
phones). For example, Nokia's image space (research.nokia.com/research/imagespace)
which needs a specific handheld with a geo-localization module and a compass, making
possible to add the context to the user generated content. Microsoft's Photosynth
(photosynth.net/about.aspx) allows the user to ―take a bunch of photos of the same
scene or object and automatically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D
viewing experience‖ that the user can share on the web.
Projects like MagicBook and HistoryCity use virtual world for entertainment,
specifically for children. MagicBook [106] consists of an interactive virtual book in
which the reader can become in another character of the story and move around its
pages. Real books often serve as the focus for face-to-face collaboration and in a similar
way multiple people can use the MagicBook interface at the same time. Several readers
can look at the same book and share the story together. If they‘re using the augmented
reality displays, they can each see the virtual models from their own viewpoint. Since
they can see each other at the same time as the virtual models, they can easily
communicate using normal face-to-face conversation cues.
HistoryCity [107] is a virtual world developed for children as a collaborative,
distributed environment that can support 500 simultaneous users. Residents of
HistoryCity explore, and live in, a virtual Singapore of 1870, complete with historical
buildings, costumes, and objects. At present there are 24 communities in HistoryCity,
each of them have several clubhouses. When users first join HistoryCity, they select
avatars as their representations and these become the ―bodies‖ that other users see.
Currently HistoryCity provides around 200 different avatars. In the user centric media
cluster, VirtualLife (www.ict-virtuallife.eu) is showing some examples of these
collaborative environments.
2.4.1.4 Social Networks Internet Services
It should be noticed that the purpose of this chapter is not to give an exhaustive and
thorough state-of-the art in each and every area. Other areas should not be excluded. Yet,
we highlight the areas that have been selected as the most important ones and give the
interested readers ‗the first step‘ for their further research.

Social graphs. A graph is a mathematical abstraction for modelling relationships
between things. A graph is constructed from nodes (the things) and edges (the
relationships). This mathematical tool that can model natural and artificial systems
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such as economy, deceases, power grids, etc. has been used by the anthropologists,
sociologists and other humanities oriented academics. However, graph analysis and
social network analysis are also valuable tools for studying the web and human
behaviours of the web users. Social network analysis may be applied in any web
field where a graph may be constructed. From the appearance of social networking
sites, users were forming graphs with their friends and this was the ideal source of
fresh data to apply social network analysis. One of the most prominent issues in
social networks is the formation or the identification of a network of nodes based on
real world knowledge (school friends, colleagues etc.) or web extracted knowledge
(they are part of the same online community, they like the same movies, etc.).
Social network analysis applied in the web by utilising the interconnected Web 2.0
blogs and their comments. Backlinks of posts and the blogroll (list of other blogs) of
each blog constructed a graph that could provide some information. This structure
was difficult to update, error prone (copy paste links, write urls, etc.) and the users
had to have a web page or blog of their own. Social networking sites created the tool
that made relations easier to track and build. Now every user that has an account in a
SNS can ―tag‖ information and propagate it to that network. ―Likes‖, ―tweets‖,
―diggs‖, etc. are one button actions that users perform while surfing the web in order
to post a piece of information without leaving from the current web page. Facebook
Open Graph2 provides an interface for interconnecting web pages with the Facebook
social graph. The most common practice is to add a ―Like‖ button near a media
object in a web page and let users share their ―Likes‖. When a user clicks the ―Like‖
button outside the Facebook platform, a new connection is formed in the user‘s
profile. This simple API has significant impact on the generated content in the
Facebook platform considering the 500 million active Facebook users that surf the
web and collect ―Likes‖.

Microblogging. Microblogging websites are services, which enable their users to
post small text messages that will update their personal profile and will also be
delivered to their list of friends. Microblogging became extremely popular due to
twitter, however other microblogging sites exist as well with similar functionalities.
Twitter currently has approximately 190 million users and growing. After its
extreme popularity and due to its flexibility and integration in several platforms
(mobile phones, desktop apps, email alerts etc.) marketing experts invented a new
tool for fast and targeted advertising. The statistics provided from pearAnalytis 3
study reveal that almost 44% of the posts are spam and pointless, about 6% are
personal or product advertising, while 3.6% are news and 37.6% are conversational
posts.
However, there are many other microblogging services available. Tumblr 4 provides
similar functionalities, however more focus on the design and styling is given. A
more flexible microblogging solution is posterous5 that provides a unique way to
post small messages to various destinations. Posterous enables a user to connect
his/her social networking accounts to the posterous platform and to deliver the posts
also to other social networking sites or email addresses of choice. One very
powerful feature that is relatively new for microblogging as well as for the social
networking platforms is the ability for the user to post a message only to a selected
2
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph
http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Twitter-Study-August-2009.pdf
4
http://www.tumblr.com/
5
https://posterous.com/
3
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group of friends or other recipients and not necessarily for the whole list of friends.
A new mobile service that extends this feature and works on the boundaries of
microblogging is GroupMe6. Users of GroupMe compile groups of their contacts
and use a new unique telephone number to reach the group.

Identity algorithms and APIs. Identity algorithms are used to avoid the pollution
of the social graph or provide easy access to potential users. In the process of
opening their platforms to the outside world, SNSs embraced or build several APIs.
The aims of these APIs are to engage more users, get more content from the web or
ease the access of users and interlink their content in various sites. The following
paragraphs of the subsection refer to such APIs and protocols that are used in most
of the known SNSs or sites that provide third party social networking
functionalities. OAuth provides a method for clients to access server resources on
behalf of a resource owner (such as a different client or an end-user). It also
provides a process for end-users to authorise third-party access to their server
resources without sharing their credentials (typically, a username and password
pair), using user-agent redirections 7 . Facebook platform uses OAuth 2.0 for
authentication and authorisation in desktop as well as in mobile applications.
OpenID is a protocol that provides easy sign up or sign in functionality for the
users. Most of the widely known web and social networking sites use openID to
provide their users with single sign in username and password. Sites like Google,
Yahoo!, Face-book, MySpace8, flickr9, wordpress10 and many others use it in order
to allow users to enter without the discouraging registration forms and with a unique
login for every service. By registering once, a user is able to access any service that
supports openID with the same username-password pair that s/he used for the first
service. Except for the above mentioned services that act also as openID providers,
there are also dedicated openID providers such as claimID11, myOpenID12, etc.

Social media search. Since the domination of social networking sites as the primary
channel of communicating ideas and sharing media, new social search engines
emerged. However, these search engines crawl the social networks and index the
available content based only on text. Some of these keyword-based social search
engines are: Spy13, SamePoint14, SocialMention15, WhosTalkin16, wikio.com.17
Spy is a web application that is updated in real time and provides the user with the
ability to watch what is being said in a certain topic in specific social networking
sites and blogs. SamePoint provides an easy interface for the user to select in which
of the social networks to search for a keyword or topic. SocialMention works like
Google alerts18 but for social media. WhosTalkin is a social media search tool that
allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about
6
http://groupme.com/
http://oauth.net/ (accessed Nov 2010)
8
http://www.myspace.com/
9
http://www.flickr.com/
10
http://wordpress.com/
11
http://claimid.com/
12
http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ (accessed Nov 2010)
13
http://spy.appspot.com/
14
http://www.samepoint.com
15
http://socialmention.com/
16
http://www.whostalkin.com/
17
http://www.wikio.com/
18
http://www.google.com/alerts/
7
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the most. Wikio is a personalisable news page featuring a news search engine that
searches media sites, blogs and the contributions of Wikio members.

Content management in large scale. In the scale that most of the prime social
networks operate, even the most common operations are not trivial. The most
powerful example is Facebook that has to handle almost 500 Million active users
that share more that 3 billion photos per month and its servers should serve about
1.2 million photos per second19. For such volumes of content management becomes
a very crucial issue. Here we refer to some technologies and tools that most of the
social networks use in order to survive the torrents of queries. Memcached20 is a
distributed caching system that caches database queries in order to minimise the
relatively slow database access. Memcached started from LiveJournal blogging and
social networking site and released as open source. At this time Facebook runs
thousands Memcached servers with tens of terabytes of cached data. Cassandra21 is
a distributed storage system with no single point of failure. It‘s one of the poster
children for the NoSQL movement (others are MongoDB, Redis etc.) and has been
made open source (it becomes an Apache project). Cassandra is in use at Digg22,
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit 23 , Rackspace 24 , Cloudkick 25 , Cisco 26 , SimpleGeo 27 ,
Ooyala 28 , OpenX 29 , and more companies that have large, active data sets. The
largest production cluster has over than 100 TB of data in over than 150 machines.

Human powered and community question answering. Human powered systems
emerged from the social networks, which provided the ability to the user to
contribute with web content. Since artificial intelligence and computer vision
problems were consistent, the researchers envisioned that the solution to unsolved
problems was to harness the human intelligence. However, to engage users to
answer questions, annotate image or proofread OCR extracted text for free had to
have something as a reward. Towards this end the ―games with a purpose‖ (GWAP)
appeared. In a GWAP the user answers or solves difficult for a computer but easy
for a human problems while s/he plays an online game.
In the same track, online community question answering sites provide a place that
everyone can contribute by answering questions from other members. The answers
are validated by a ―start-based‖ system where the end user gives feedback whether
the answer was helpful or not. Some of the well known community questions
answering systems are yahoo! Answers30 for general questions, stackoverflow31 for
questions on programming, serverFault 32 for server administrators and IT
professionals or ―Seasoned Advice‖33 for cooking professionals and many others.
19
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/ (accessed Nov 2010)
http://memcached.org/
21
http://cassandra.apache.org/
22
http://digg.com/news
23
http://www.reddit.com/
24
http://www.rackspace.com/
25
https://www.cloudkick.com/
26
http://www.cisco.com/
27
http://simplegeo.com/
28
http://www.ooyala.com/
29
http://www.openx.org/
30
http://answers.yahoo.com/
31
http://stackoverflow.com/
32
http://serverfault.com/
33
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/
20
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A very interesting service is the Aardvark 34 search engine, which finds the most
relevant person from the user‘s contact list and the entire community of the users to
answer a question. Aardvark accepts questions in natural language (not just
keywords) and uses a novel algorithm35 in order to map the question to the most
relevant recipient.

Mobility and geolocation. Location-based social networks allow members to share
their location through GPS, Bluetooth, email or text messaging. The member of the
network may also add comments about restaurants, allow friends to know where you
are going, share information, or find friends that are few blocks away or even in the
Café across the road.
Several mobile-only social networks have emerged, all with unique features that
would potentially attract users. However, there is one feature that every mobile
social network should have and this is physical presence detection and information
exchange36. This is exactly the reason for porting a community in a mobile device
and detach it from a desktop PC. Some of the well known location based mobile
social networks are: BrightKite 37 , Aka-Aki 38 , Mobiluck 39 . The mobile social
network sites may be clustered in 6 main categories 40 based on their dominant
features. These are:
1. The group texter: This service focuses on sending short, text-based messages in a
group of people at once.
2. The radar: The radar knows where the user and his/her friends are. These sites
support location-based services by keeping track of where the user‘s contacts are.
Most of these sites allow the user to check if there is anyone close to a particular
venue or location, while some of them actively alert him/her if any of his/her
contacts are within a certain distance.
3. The Geotagger: These sites allow users to tag locations with images and
information that appear on a world map. The user may tag favourite places for
shopping, dining or any other activity and share these tags with their friends and the
network.
4. The dating service: These sites are identical to their online counterparts. Users
create a profile and they are matched with other users. Some also use radar features
to alert the user if an interesting (according to the profile) person is nearby.
5. The social networker: These sites aim to be as similar as possible to online social
networking platforms. Some of the well known SNS such as Facebook and twitter
have also a mobile version.
6. The Media share: These sites share media files with groups of people.
There are also location-based social networks that are not targeting mobile devices
only, such as picasa and flickr image geotagging services.
34
http://vark.com/
http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf
36
Michael Arrington, Techcrunch.com, http://techcrunch.com/2007/09/11/the-holy-grail-for-mobilesocial-networks/ (accessed Nov 2010)
37
http://brightkite.com/
38
http://www.aka-aki.com/
39
http://www.mobiluck.com/en/
40
http://www.gomonews.com/moso/
35
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
Social rankings and vertical social networks. Although these may not be
considered as pure social networks, special attention should be given to the social
sites which are dedicated to vertical markets such as the travellers community (for
example tripadvisor41, travbuddy42 or dopplr 43 ), films or music. These sites offer
services opinion sharing by the users and they compute rankings. For example,
dopplr allows its members to register their personal and business travel plans and
get alerts for friends in same places, travel overlaps, or get travel advice from other
travellers. One of the open issues is to establish methodologies and tools to
distinguish between real and fake opinions on those social sites, which is applicable
to social networks in general.
User Generated
Virtual Worlds
Interactivity in
broadcasting
Reconstructed
content
Collaborative User
Generated Content
User Generated
Content
3D serious gaming
New Media
Experience
3D Virtual
Experience
User Preferences &
Profile
2.4.2 Research Challenges
All the projects of the User Centric media cluster have in common that they aim to have
the user in the middle of the media chain. Therefore they cooperate in the User Centric
Media Cluster within the Networked Media unit, which coordinates strategic research
directions44.
MyMedia
VirtualLife
TA2
PlayMancer
Games@Large
CITIZEN MEDIA
FascinatE
OMWeb
My eDirector
2012 Table 1. Comparison of User Centric Media Cluster projects
Taking into account that people have less and less difficulty to access to the multimedia
information, it becomes clear that the content is expected to play a significant role in the
Future Internet. In this sense, we can identify at least three main topics where the User
Centric Media will have to address clear challenges [109].
We may identify the following research challenges in the area of User Centric Media:

Personalization: user centric systems should allow users to have an efficient way of
locating the desired information based on their preferences and their profiles.

Adaptive Multimedia Content: create new approaches to media containers that
allow a semantic-based, personalized creation and delivery concept.

Content Mobility and Accessibility: media should adapt to a form that suits the user
independently of locations and device.
41
http://www.tripadvisor.com
http://www.travbuddy.com/
43
http://www.dopplr.com/
44
Please note that project FascinatE objectives fit in more than one clusters.
42
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
Availability of 3D Immersive Applications Everywhere and at Any Time: research
for more efficient coding, streaming, broadcasting and visualization in different
kind of terminals are required

Real Time 3D Navigation and Physical and Emotional Involvement of the User:
the user should be emotionally and physically involved, and his senses and
emotions should be stimulated at a very high level by 3D immersive media.
Towards this aim there is a need for applications able to support sensorial
interaction and applications for virtual and augmented reality.

From 2D to 3D Content: the transaction from 2D to 3D media should be as smooth
and easy as possible. Thus, it's of great importance to identify how to transform
already available 2D contents into their correspondent 3D version in an easy and
possibly automated way.

Innovative 3D Networks of People: 3D immersive media should be able to support
a new form of social networking, as all the social relationships between people will
not only pass through the use of ―nicknames‖ and ―pictures‖, but also through an
avatar, a graphic representation.

Innovative Organization and Distribution of the 3D Contents and Services: the
challenge related to the passage from informational to experimental web will be
that of organizing contents and information in a new, innovative and intuitive way,
in order to revolutionize the query, retrieval, fruition and creation of
information/data/AV products.

Customized 3D Contents: the user should have the possibility to personalize and
customize the contents and the 3D immersive experience by his/her own. This
automatically leads to another important issue to be taken into account: the
protection of intellectual property.

Dynamic Services Provision: users as individuals or as members of communities
will expect, and service providers must deliver, access to a range of different
concurrent services, provided regardless of the user‘s location and adapting to a
knowledge of the user‘s needs in terms of their context and of the capabilities of
their accessing device.

Trust and Security: new media Internet communities will thrive only if they are
properly secured from the damage that could be caused by malicious attack or
negligence and if the users perceive the new communities to safe.

Dynamic Service Creation: in a network that links and coordinates things, people
and media will need significant new research to help service providers build better
services. Ideally it should be possible to dynamically construct services based on
the ―on the fly‖ construction of networks of things people and media to a user in
any location at any time.
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3 Market Assessment and Business Targets
The growth of Internet has resulted in a significant impact, as it has become the day by
day core communication environment of millions of people worldwide. The Future
Internet shall be capable to meet new expectations and needs, by providing the means to:
i) facilitate everyday life of people, communities and organizations,
ii) allow the creation of any type of business regardless of their size, domain and
technology, and
iii) break the barriers/boundaries between information producer and information
consumer.
The latter will foster the emergence of prosumers: people/communities will be part of
the creative flow of content and process, and not just consumers. Distributed knowledge
can thus be shared easily and opinions can be made public in almost real-time. Current
Internet is not able to exploit the possibilities that today‘s increasing bandwidth offers.
Moreover, new technologies are constantly emerging in the 3D world, but they concern
mainly animation material (scenes created by a computer) together with the well
established modelling tools and languages.
In this context, the nextMEDIA project aims to coordinate the Networked Media Unit
projects in order to impact the Future Internet, and benefit from the new market
opportunities. In order to offer a targeted approach, we assess in the following the
sections the different market segments that most project target.
3.1 Delivery of multimedia content
As already analysed the delivery of multimedia content is the main business target of
many projects of the unit (mainly the Future Media Networks cluster). In this market
direction we may highlight the following market potentials:
3.1.1 Networked A/V Media market potential
There are already many factors that clearly show the great potential of A/V
media/content market. First of all, the (user generated) content stored or streamed is
growing exponentially. As it is shown in Figure 5 users are changing their content
consumption patterns. Moreover, as shown in Figure 6, the percentage of
users/subscribers generating personal content has reached 16% by the end of 2009.
Figure 5. Users Content consumption patterns[120]
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Figure 6. Grown of User Generated Content [124]
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Another important factor is the significant percentages of Internet users, who are now
paying for online content experiences (Figure 7). Figure 8 depicts that users are paying
for 25% of the videos that they download from the Internet. As more mainstream
consumers begin to utilize Internet content services as complements to existing
subscriptions (broadband, television, mobile phone, etc.), it is expected to see a growing
number of users paying for these services as value-added services rather than standalone subscriptions. Also, the growing links between content and the platforms from
which consumers will access and enjoy the content are also becoming stronger.
Revenues for such online entertainment activities as gaming, music, and video – all of
which can be enjoyed with a simple broadband connection and a home computer – will
exceed $17 billion world-wide annually by the end of 2012 [125].
Figure 7. Internet Users Paying for Online Content [125] Figure 8. Free vs Purchased Internet Download [126]
Another added valued service is 3D video streaming, even over overlay networks. IPTV
is growing rapidly (Figure 9). Only in Europe, the IPTV subscribers will grow from 0.9
millions in 2005 to 24 millions in 2011. Of the three regions, Europe and North
America are generating a significant amount of this revenue; in Asia, though the number
of subscribers is high, it is generating a lower amount of revenue due to lower average
prices.
Figure 9. Growth of IPTV Subscribers (a) world wide (b) in Europe [127]
3.1.2 Home networking market potential
Europe a very important value and is continuously increasing. The values of ADSL
penetration in Europe range from 78.3 % in Malta down to a 27.8% in Portugal. The
market is still developing and what is important to notice is that users that are connected
to Internet are switching from narrowband to broadband in most of the cases. The next
step is to provide home access for speeds of up to 50 Mbps, while many large telecom
operators like France Telecom and Telefonica are already launching commercially the
FTTH solution targeting the Home of 2010.
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Yet, in order not only to return the huge investment, but also turn FTTH solution
profitable, new broadband services are required. One of these services is IPTV. As
already shown in Figure 9 the IPTV subscribers are increasing heavily. Other market
studies [128] show that among the telecom operators that offer IPTV service France
Telecom ranks first (having 0,426 and 0,1017 millions of European subscribers in 2006
and 2007 respectively), followed by Telefónica (having 0,267 and 0,469 millions of
European subscribers in 2006 and 2007 respectively). New really broadband services
are required to make FTTH a real need. As it is shown in Figure 10, value-added service
providers and telecom operator should move towards more innovative, bandwidth
hungry services e.g. HD video and HD video Calls.
Figure 10. Value-added Services vs. bandwidth consumption and revenue generation [129]
Apart from the access network and the value-added services, the in-home network
represents another very promising market. As shown in Figure 12, the number and
penetration of home networks in Europe and World-wide are increasing year by year.
Figure 11. Home Networking Growth wordwide [130]
Nowadays, digital content is almost on every terminal or consumer equipment that can
be found in home. In Spain, for example, the digital consumption of media measures in
traffic has increased from 60,000 Terabytes in 2000 up to 1,000,000 Terabytes in the
last few years. Therefore, users have now an increasing need of home networking
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solutions in order to share or stream their digital content among terminals and are
willing to share this content with others in many formats.
Figure 12. Home Networking Growth in Europe [130]
The Digital Home transformation (from security and domotic services up to advanced
multimedia services with very high quality video images (HD)) is shown in Figure 13.
The A/V consumer electronic devices (LCD TVs, Home Audio systems, Digital Set-top
boxes, Digital Cameras) are among the top 8 revenue areas in the Digital Home, while
the DTV chipsets shipment world-wide is another large market area (Figure 14).
However, the economic crisis is expected to put barriers on the consumption of digital
goods and telecommunications. An important pressure will be put into the commercial
offerings for connectivity.
Figure 13. Top Revenue product areas by Application (2007-2012) [131]
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Figure 14. DTV chipsets shipments by region [132]
3.1.3 Content-Aware Distribution, Storage and DPI market potential
ABI research foreseen (Figure 15) that media network device shipments will increase
from less than 40 millions into 2005 to more than 350 million units in 2011, while the
Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is expected between 44% to 48% during the
2003-2011 period.
Figure 15. Media Network Device Shipments [133]
Content aware storage (CAS) is also one of the fastest growing areas of the storage
market [120]. Companies are implementing CAS solutions to meet the needs of
compliance regulations, litigation protection and to enable better IT efficiencies. CAS
storage systems set up retention policies on objects (file + metadata) preventing anyone
from editing or deleting them for a period of time. In some cases the period of time can
be three years and in other cases it is forever. The method for creating retention periods
is proprietary from system to system. This creates a major issue for companies that are
implementing CAS systems - vendor lock-in.
An easy process is needed to move data from one CAS system to another that
guarantees and provides audit trails proving that objects have not been altered or
changed and that the retention period is still intact. Today there are no tools that provide
this capability and no one seems all that interested in providing one. CAS is rapidly
emerging with over $1 billion dollars in revenue, which means a lot of companies are
buying these products.
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In parallel, Deep Packet Inspection seams to be the only currently available technology
capable to provide security of IP traffic at ever growing rates that has inherent traffic
management capabilities. Recently massive growth in data processing power and new
cyber threats have spurred the deployment of DPI technologies. As it is reported in [120]
just the U.S. Government DPI market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 36% from
2010 to around US$ 1.8 Billion by 2015. The market will see a few good years of
explosive growth in all segments before going flat.
Figure 16: Deep Packet Inspection: U.S. Government Market forecast 2010-2015 [120]
3.2 3D Media Internet Technologies
The 3D Media Internet will depend on the availability of methods and systems that
allow the ordinary and professional users to create, transmit, share and enjoy highquality 3D media experiences. Moreover, the advancements on research and
development of technologies related to the production, transmission and consumption of
3D Media is going through a major revolution. In fact there is a clear trend for
equipment manufacturers to increase the refinement and expansion of their 3D business
capacities. An example of this is clearly taking place within the movie industry where
manufacturers of 3D cameras, dedicated 3D postproduction systems and other business
actors in the production of 3D movies are working on a full line of 3D-based products
aiming to provide technology and cost viability to make the new next big business
revolution out of 3D Media. This example that is evident even to the great public after
the breakthrough given by recent film ―Avatar‖ is developing as the new trend for all
Media production at different levels such as broadcasters, new home and portable
devices manufacturers and content producers among others. The assessment of 3D
Media market will be only a matter of time after equipment manufacturers will make
available the specific products they are currently working on for 3D acquisition,
efficient encoding and decoding of 3D images, dedicated storage, high speed data
handling, projection, rendering, content and special effects production.
In particular, in the visual domain, navigable 3D environments may either be
synthesised by CGI or created from ‗real-world‘ scenes by multi-camera capture, 3D
scanning, or omnidirectional video. Synthetic CG is predominant for 3D on the Internet,
via means including VRML, x3d, java3d, MPEG4, COLLADA, croquet, and canvas3dr.
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Models created and displayed in such environments typically suffer from a highly
cartoon-like look. Techniques for creating, animating, editing and interacting with
synthetic 3D shapes and appearance are well understood: 3DStudio Max and Maya (and
a host of plugins) are very widely used for developing computer games, creating
animated movies, film and television visual effects, and visualising information.
Recently, Microsoft released Photosynth to the public, allowing users to upload sets of
still photographs for the synthesis of browsable 3D panoramas. Photosynth uses
computation intensive point detection, feature matching and multi-view geometry
algorithms: in effect, the service provides general public access (for Windows Vista and
XP clients) to professional model extraction and surface mapping technologies. Apple‘s
QuickTime VR and similar technologies based on panoramic photography offer a
convincing sense of 3D albeit restricted to static scenes, and allowing very limited
navigation possibilities. In the professional domain, dynamic 3D representations of
people and objects can be captured by filming multiple view points, using synchronized
video cameras. Canesta‘s 3D sensor technology is moving toward applications in games
and gesture-controlled TV sets, and 3dvsystems has announced a prototype ‗Zcam‘ or
3D webcam for PC gaming or video-conference background replacement. For many
Internet applications, it is not necessary for 3D content to be modified by the viewer,
who only needs the freedom to ―look around‖ at will and ―move around‖ a predefined
network of paths. In these cases, omnidirectional (immersive, panoramic) video offers a
much simpler alternative to multi-camera capture or 3D CGI.
The RenderWare system, developed by David Lau Kee, was an early and extremely
successful games engine, built around a series of middleware components that could be
selectively combined to create a custom engine with graphics, rendering and 3D
capabilities. Most 3D engines and rendering systems are built on a graphics API such as
Direct3D or OpenGL, which provides a software abstraction of the GPU or video card.
Software renderers have been largely replaced by hardware-accelerated 3D graphics,
but provide greater visual accuracy where real-time performance (frames-per-second)
unimportant, and are essential when the hardware does not support shaders or Direct3D.
As game engine technology matures and becomes more user-friendly, independent
developers have created applications for devices ranging from the Xbox to the iPhone
and there has been a growth in serious games for visualization, training and medical
simulation. Millions of Internet users now create content, participate in and manage
different forms of communities and activities where this content plays an important role.
―Web 2.0,‖ is characterised by participation and democracy in a world where users own
and control the data97 and share their content through popular services such as
YouTube and MySpace and interactive entertainment sites such as SecondLife. In 3D
virtual community applications, such as Second Life, the focus is on social interaction
rather than gaming and users can create their own spaces. Text chat is the predominant
way for users communicate and most applications also allow 3D avatar representations
to employ a range of predefined gestures. Sites such IMVU offer real-time 3d chat using
doll-like but customisable avatars, which look crude but offer an engaging vicarious
experience.
3.2.1 3D Media Delivery market potential
With no doubt, video/audio market and broadband market are two key business factors
to foster competitiveness and create new scales of economy. As shown in Figure 15,
these technologies are expected to represent a huge potential market of up 649Trillion
Yen (4900 Billion Euros) world-wide by 2020.
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Super-High
Vision
Boardcasting
Industry
3D Video
Technology
Supper-3D
surround
sound
technology
Multi-sensory Percept/Transmit
Communications
of the human
affection &
sensibility
Figure 17. Media delivery technologies market roadmap [100]
The roadmap clearly demonstrates the complexity and devotion that these objectives
require, while the huge market potential strongly suggests that Europe‘s ICT has to face
them seriously in order to be able to compete in the shorter and longer term with the
world-wide competition.
3.2.2 Virtual worlds market potential
A great deal of emerging technologies, such as simulation rides, video conferencing,
virtual reality, home theatre or high definition television are designed to provide end
users with the experience of remote presence. Although traditional media such as
telephone, radio or television offer also a certain little degree of remote presence, new
technologies aim to develop this concept and make it more sophisticated, in a way that
it makes effect in physiological and psychological aspects [145]. It is expected that the
end user is going to take the main role, not only just act as an observer. This will bring
more opportunities for the creation of new applications such as the remote presence in
virtual worlds.
A Virtual World is normally defined as being a computer-based persistent virtual
environment, where users can interact, via their avatars, with each other and the
environments. Virtual Worlds can be categorized in different ways: regarding
technology used they can be 2D, 2.5D, 3D, regarding target age they can be for kids,
tweens, teens or adults, regarding contents they can be realistic or cartoony,
representing a real world or pure fantastic locations, regarding fruition they can be
business driven, game based, social network like.
The market of Virtual Worlds is growing bigger and bigger especially in the
kids/tweens/teens market with 2D themed applications like Habbo Hotel
(http://www.habbo.com/),
Neopets
(www.neopets.com),
Club
Penguin
(www.clubpenguin.com), Barbie Girls (http://www.barbiegirls.com/home.html) and
Gaia Online (www.gaiaonline.com) counting something like 200 Millions of registered
users all together. Market data shows that there are now over 200 youth-oriented virtual
worlds live, planned, or in active development [135]. In particular to the youth-oriented
virtual, the target age the market can be broken down into virtual worlds targeting kids
(7 and under), preteens (8-12), and teens (13+). The kids market is the leader. 107
worlds are aiming for at least part of their main audience to fall in the under-7 range. 90
offerings target tweens, while teens are still a relative open space with only 78 worlds
targeting them.
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Figure 18. Virtual Worlds Compared to Other Online Communications Tools
Compared to other online communications and social media platforms, virtual world
has several technical advantages, including an immersive environment, presence,
synchronous communications, high engagement and rich interactive features (Figure
18).
Figure 19. Total and monthly active users in 3D virtual worlds [136]
As it is shown in Figure 19, the users of the 3D virtual worlds are expected to be
drastically increased. However, both the adoption and active usage of virtual worlds lag
behind other online applications. For instance, as shown in (Figure 20) only 13% of the
adult broadband users in the U.K. have ever tried a virtual world, compared to 54% for
social networks. In addition, only 23% of virtual‐world visitors visit on a weekly basis,
compared to 59% for social networks
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Figure 20. Virtual Worlds vs. Social Networks (UK: Q3/08) [136]
Moreover, Figure 21 clearly shows that the top 3 reasons for visiting a virtual world are
related with social networking. People lack communication and meeting with friends (if
any) is difficult. These metrics show that virtual world has yet to find the best
intersection between entertainment, socialization, and community features. A lack of
content that appeals to mass‐market consumers, suboptimal user interface and
technologies, and the unbalanced gender ratio compared to social networks have all
contributed to the low adoption rate and low activity ratio. One of the reasons that
2D/2.5D worlds have become very popular, is because many tweens rely on Internet
tools to keep up with their friends after school.
Figure 21. Reasons for Visiting Virtual Worlds [137]
Virtual worlds provide a good environment for them to socialize with existing friends
and make new friends while concurrently engaging in entertaining activities like gaming
and listening to music. Several other key factors contribute to the success of
youth‐oriented virtual worlds. For these reasons, large media companies, toy companies,
and other brands are investing serious money and efforts into the space. Media
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companies are especially active; Viacom purchased Neopets in 2005 for $160 million,
and Disney acquired Club Penguin for $700 million last year. Other popular worlds,
including Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, and Stardoll, are the subject of frequent
acquisition rumours. The interest is justified. Not only are virtual worlds attracting
eyeball hours and dollars from many kids and teens, they also increase the level of
engagement with brands and content. For instance, in May 2008, Nickelodeon
announced that, thanks to Neopets, its cluster of family and childoriented sites achieve
an astonishing 80 minutes of time spent per visitor per month. This announcement
received much attention from many other media companies.
3.2.3 Social Immersive Environments
Social networking is one of the most relevant new business models which appeared on
the Internet in the past years. Social media aims the grouping of individuals into specific
groups inside a domain.
Individuals are the most valuable part of these social networks. In this section we cover
the social networks focused on new multimedia user-centric content services such as
immersive media in social networks (e.g. user generated immersive environments).
Participation of the users in new multimedia immersive services in social networks it is
expected to grow in a near future. Users can participate in the immersive media services
such as immersion in user virtual worlds by creating their user-generated Virtual
Worlds and participate in new experiences in social virtual immersive networks
(according to the European Commission studies the use of social networks has grown
over the past year by 35% in Europe and is expected to more than double to 107.4
million users by 2012).
The following figure indicates the market reach in 16 European countries of social
networks compared to the total Internet users per country in 2008.
Figure 22. Market reach of social networks in Europe 2008 (Source: comScore)
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The social networking sites become a global phenomenon since the number of users
who are members to them are spread through out the globe (¡Error! No se encuentra el
origen de la referencia.). Moreover, the following facts prove the power of social
networking on the Internet45:
 1 Billion subscribers in Social Networking Websites World Wide
 154 Million people accessing a Social Networking Website every day
 1 Billion minutes spent on Social Networking every day
 8 Billion pages accessed on Social Networking Websites every day
Figure 23. The world map of social networking
The current forms of online communication in the social networks are text-based,
multimedia exchange-based and most advanced are avatar-based.
The new research directions for immersive environments are the tele-immersive usercentric services. New collaborative services such as the creation 3D Immersive
Augmented Worlds using the tools described in the section 2, enable users to join,
interact, communicate and share time with each other participating in the social virtual
augmented world network, and expanding their 3D immersive augmented world based
on the user-group‘s wishes. The most relevant research directions identified are:

3D social networks equipped with novel immersive experiences,

the collaboratively user generated environment; instead of joining a predefined
world, the users themselves will recreate real places and will be able to
continuously expand their 3D Immersive Augmented World according to their
desires, thus allowing them to express themselves in a different way,

realism; it will be achieved by replacing avatars with real reconstructions, and
through more natural interaction, since users‘ emotions and expressions will
actually get depicted.
3.2.4 Value added services and market potential
45
Joao Da Silva, CHORUS Event, Geneva, 10 October 2007
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Value-added services represent a huge market potential. Only in 2007, the U.S.
broadband value-added services industry generated approximately $409 million in total
revenue (Figure 24). Premium technical support and broadband entertainment services
represented the largest categories, with $327 million and $78 million, respectively. The
total service provider value-added services market is expected to grow to almost $1.3
billion in 2009.
Figure 24. US Broadband Value-added services revenues [138]
3.3 Networked Search
The Internet was initially designed and primarily used by scientists for networking
research and for exchanging information between each other. However, due to the
explosion of the World Wide Web (which started as a document repository) and its
successful descendants (Web 2.0), along with the dramatic increase of net-based
audiovisual material (networked media) that has been produced by professional and
most recently by amateur users, the Internet is rapidly transforming into a fully fledged
virtual environment that facilitates services, interaction and communication.
Digital Production (exabytes)
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
2006
2007
2010
2011
Figure 25: Audiovisual Content Production (professional or amateur)
Figure 25 depicts how digital content production has evolved. In 2006, digital content,
produced by either professional or amateur users, reached the capacity of 160 exabytes,
while it is expected that by 2010 it will reach the capacity of 990 exabytes, inducing a 6
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fold increase [140]. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year will
be almost 10 times the content produced in 2006.
However, the increasing availability of digital content poses, at the same time, an
obstacle to its acquisition by users and dictates the need for a search engine to assist
easy access and retrieval of relevant content. The use of search engines is adopted by
the majority of users worldwide. It is worth to mention that 85% of Internet users use
search engines to access desired content. Typing ―Google‖ is easier than remembering a
specific website spelling, while its toolbar is by far the most dominant interface to
today‘s WEB information. Today, there are thousands of search engines and directories
worldwide, but only a handful of those produce the vast majority of all search engine
traffic. As it is shown in Figure 26, Google has already captured the 71,49% of the
market share in the years 2005-2008, rising even to the 77,34% in 2008.
Figure 26: Search Engine Market Share for Year 2005 to Year 2008
In order to fulfil the emerging need for multimedia content, the existing search engines
have been enriched with media-search capabilities (e.g. ―Google Image‖, ―Google
Sketchup‖, etc.). Search and retrieval of multimedia content, using the abovementioned
search engines, is still limited to text-based queries. The user enters keywords or tight,
concentrated phrases and retrieves media objects whose annotation matches the given
keywords. Although this mechanism of text-based media retrieval is the most widely
adopted, it is not the most efficient way to perform a media search. An ideal search
engine should allow users perform search by using as query any type of input modality
that best fits to their preferences.
Towards the development of content-based audiovisual search engines, current
European and regional initiatives have endeavoured to provide solutions for multimedia
content retrieval using as input relevant media content. A detailed description of these
initiatives is given in CHORUS Coordination Action (www.corus-ist.eu). These search
engines, though, suffer from several limitations, which prevent them for being widely
accepted by the majority of users. An example is that each engine is designed to deal
with only one or few types of content. This forces users to switch from one engine to
another when looking for different types of content simultaneously.
Another drawback of the existing search engines is that they provide limited search
capabilities for mobile devices. This problem is becoming even more critical, taking
into account the growth of mobile Internet. The increase of mobile Internet access is
depicted in the Table below. The number of mobile Internet users worldwide is
expected to reach the 982 million users by 2011, which is three times bigger than it was
in 2006 [139] Mobile Internet access is supported by the availability of innovative
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devices that have recently come out on the market (like the iPhone in 2007), which are
making mobile web browsing addictive. The search engines are also betting on mobile,
with Yahoo! going so far as to say that there will be more mobile Internet users than
Web users by 2017.
2006
Mobile Internet Users
337.3
Mobile Search Users
266.0
Mobile Search Ad Revenues* $6.8
2007
405.5
327.2
$63.1
2008
489.6
410.7
$221.3
2009
596.4
516.8
$580.3
2010
757.1
672.3
$1148.9
2011
982.4
901.1
$2361.5
Table 6. Worldwide Mobile Internet Users, Mobile Search Users and Mobile Search
Advertising Revenues, 2006-2011 (millions)
Yet people are conducting mobile searches right now, with 266.0 million mobile search
users in 2006. This is predicted to grow quickly to 901.1 million by 2011, with mobile
search ad revenues soaring to $2.4 billion in 2011 from $6.8 million in 2006 [139].
Taking these facts into account, mobile search and retrieval should by no means be
underestimated, since it is expected to have significant market impact the upcoming
years. Towards the creation of a future audiovisual search engine, effort should be put
into the design and implementation of specialised mechanisms and interfaces to address
the limited presentation and interaction capabilities of the mobile devices.
A competitive multimedia searching framework should have a really breakthrough
philosophy, rather than simply an innovative technology. Given the enormous demand
for personal and commercial content rich services provision, a unified audiovisual
search framework is needed, not only as an information space where users can query
data, but as a collaborative environment where a large number of users can at any time
share, annotate, retrieve and visualize a large amount of data of any kind including text,
image, audio, video and 3D media documents.
3.3.1 Social and Economic Impact
There are already a number of factors that clearly show the great potential in marketing
of searching frameworks of large audiovisual content. First of all, the IP content stored
in home systems is growing exponentially. As it is shown in Figure 27, the percentage
of users/subscribers having IP-content (personal or commercial available) is expected to
reach 16% until 2009 [140].
Percentage of users/subscribers having IP-content
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
Figure 27: Grown of IP-based Content
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The type of the stored content is also very important to define the future services and
applications. As it is shown in Figure 28, digital pictures are available in the vast
majority of home/personal storage devices, followed by music [142]. Yet, personal
videos and movies even today result in a significant percentage (26% and 17%
respectively).
90
84
Percentage of Internet Users (%)
80
70
59
60
50
36
40
26
30
20
17
10
0
Movies and TV
shows
Personal videos
Video clips
Music
Digital pictures
Figure 28: Digital Content on Home Computers
Moreover, the user habits start to change. As shown in Figure 28, among the A/V
applications, video games and music files play is going to be the majority applications
[143]. However, play DVDs and watch TV event on PCs, capture a large percentage of
PC usage. On the hand, significant percentages of Internet users are now paying for
these online content experiences [144]. As more mainstream consumers begin to utilize
Internet content services as complements to existing subscriptions (broadband,
television, mobile phone, etc.), it is expect to see a growing number of users paying for
these services as value-added services rather than stand-alone subscriptions. Also, the
growing links between content and the platforms from which consumers will access and
enjoy the content are also growing stronger. Revenues in the U.S. for such online
entertainment activities as gaming, music, and video – all of which can be enjoyed with
a simple broadband connection and a home computer – will exceed $11 billion annually
by the end of 2010.
Play Video Games
57
Play Music Files (on PC)
51
Burn Create CDs or DVDs
46
45
Edit Digital Photos
29
Play DVDs (on PC)
Create Digital Photo Slide Shows
21
Watch TV
10
8
Edit Videos
7
Record TV shows
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Percentage of Respondents using PC at least once per month for various activities
Figure 29: Computer Usage Habits
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It is also worth to note that the mobile communication users‘ habits are changing. Since
2005, nearly 90% of mobile phones have been camera capable models (Figure 29).
Service providers have been offering attractive prices to entice their customers to
purchase a camera phone, as camera phones provides them an opportunity to sell
services associated with this advanced feature. Subscribers have also shown an
increasing interest in these phones. With the introduction of mega-pixel camera phones,
with video recording and playback capabilities, the demand has further increased and
provides additional opportunities for operators to offer complimenting services.
3.4 Social Network Internet Services
Social Networking Internet services are changing the way we communicate with others,
entertain and actually live. Social Networking is one of the primary reasons that many
people have become avid Internet users; people who until the emergence of social
networks could not find interests in the web. This is a very robust indicator of what is
really happening online. The Web 2.0 era passed leaving behind great strength to the
end-users. Nowadays, users (also known as prosumers46), both produce and consume
significant quantities of multimedia content. Moreover, theis behaviour when combined
with Social Networking (i.e. communication between users through online communities)
has formed a new Internet era where multimedia content sharing through Social
Networking Sites (SNSs) is an everyday practice. More than 200 SNSs of worldwide
impact are known today and this number is growing quickly. Many of the existing top
web sites are either pure SNSs or offer some social networking capabilities47.
Except for the well known ―first tier‖ social networks with hundreds of millions of users
that span in the entire world, there are also many smaller social networking sites that are
equally as popular within the more limited geographical scope of their membership,
within a city, country or continent, for example. There are also many vertically oriented
communities that gather users around a specific topic and thus, they have many
dedicated members48.
Facebook49 is ranked as one of the most visited sites in the world, with over than 500
million subscribed users to date. Moreover, Friendster50 is popular in Asia, Orkut51 in
Brazil and Vkontakte.ru52 in Russia. On top of that, there are dozens of other purely
social networks with vibrant communities, such as Vznet53 (~17 Mio users), Xing54 (8
Mio users), Badoo55 (>70 Mio users), Netlog56 (> 70 Mio users), Tuenti57 (8 Mio users),
Barrabes58, Hyves59 (> 10 Mio users), Nasza Klasa60 (> 11 Mio users), LunarStorm61 (>
46
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer
http://www.alexa.com (accessed Nov 2010)
48
http://www.research-write.com/2010/02/social-networking-by-the-numbers.html
49
http://www.facebook.com/
50
http://www.friendster.com/
51
http://www.orkut.com/
52
http://www.vkontakte.ru/
53
http://www.vznet.net/
54
https://www.xing.com/
55
http://badoo.com/
56
http://netlog.com/
57
http://www.tuenti.com/
58
http://www.barrabes.com/home.asp
59
http://www.hyves.nl/
60
http://nk.pl/
61
http://www.lunarstorm.se/
47
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1.2 Mio users), Zoo62 (~1 Mio users), Sapo63, DailyMotion64, VBOX765, iwiw66 and so
on. There are also many vertically oriented communities that gather users around a
specific topic, such as Last.fm 67 for music or Goodreads 68 for books. Finally, many
mobile social networks appear to fill the gap and detach social networks from desktops.
Some of them are aka-aki69, itsmy70, brightkite71 and mobiluck72, to name a few.
The following figure presents a map73 of the social networks worldwide, thematically
clustered and sized proportionally to the number of registered users.
Figure 30. Overview map of online social networks
As this map shows, not all social networks are oriented to non-professional users.
LinkedIn 74 with over 80 Mio users or Viadeo 75 with 30 Mio and Xing are mostly
oriented in establishing professional connections between their users and initiate
potential business collaborations.
The rapid growth in popularity of social networks has enabled large numbers of users to
communicate, create and share content, give and receive recommendations, and, at the
same time, it opened new challenging problems. The unbounded growth of content and
users pushes the Internet technologies to its limits and demands for new solutions. SNSs
have the audience to claim their place in the primetime if they solve the challenges they
face. Twitter‘s76 ―fail whale‖ (twitter‘s downtime icon) became a social media brand
thanks to the frequent twitter‘s outages when (and not only) worldwide events take
62
http://www.zoo.gr/
http://www.sapo.pt/
64
http://www.dailymotion.com/
65
http://vbox7.com/
66
http://iwiw.hu/
67
http://www.last.fm/
68
http://www.goodreads.com/
69
http://www.aka-aki.com/
70
http://www.itsmy.com/
71
http://www.brightkite.com/
72
http://www.mobiluck.com/
73
Credits: Chiqui Esteban, Miguel Jorge. ( Downloaded from http://www.iredes.es/mapa)/
74
http://www.linkedin.com/
75
http://www.viadeo.com/
76
http://twitter.com/
63
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place. Facebook gets severe criticism due to privacy concerns. Such challenges are
present in all other SNSs to a greater or lesser extent.
The business perspectives of social networks is growing rapidly. There are now many
different solutions in the market for ―Social Business Solutions‖ and large IT companies
and consulting forms are starting to create new departments in this area. Businesses are
slowly coming to the realisation that traditional communication methods are often less
effective than social networking.
3.4.1 Social Businesses
Intra company relations: The enterprise can be considered as a dedicated social network
and all of the employees as members. In a social network the relationship between
members is flat rather than hierarchal. This flat relationship between employees can
foster collaboration, brainstorming and creativity.
―Social CRM‖: Just as with intra company relations, a more informal hierarchy can
allow companies to work together in a more collaborative way.
Blogging: Blogging can be a very direct, and interactive, way for companies to relate to
their customers, clients, shareholders, providers, etc. It is much more immediate and
personal way to transmit news and information and to get feedback directly from the
recipient.
Viral marketing (basically driven through social networks). In the last few years viral
advertising has taken on a fundamental role in the marketing campaigns of many
companies. An ad, new product or news item is directed to key persons who the
company knows or suspects have an important social position on the net and especially
within social networks. These persons pass on the ad or information to their contacts
rapidly, if the key person has been chosen adequately it can soon reach thousands or
even millions of people.
3.4.2 Social Analytic tools
The technique of data analysis of the communications in social communications (often
referred to as the ―social graph‖) is an extremely powerful tool for business. For
example, analysis of relations and communications between members of a group or a
community can show which are the most important ones (socially). This information
can be vital when a viral marketing plan is being formulated or when a loyalty scheme
is going to be implanted amongst a company‘s customers.
A great market has been opened to both the clients of the data analysis and to the
researchers and developers of new solutions for the data analysis. Argyle Social 77 ,
Trackur78 and Radian679 are some of the examples of commercial tools which are used
to analyse the data coming from social networks, profile the users and personalise the
marketing strategies.
3.4.3 Social Television
Social Television stands for technology that provides social interaction in the context of
watching TV-programs or related to television content. It is a very active area of
77
www.argylesocial.com
www.trakur.com
79
www.radian6.com
78
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research and was named one of the 10 most important technologies by the MIT. Social
Television is a fast growing market and multiple startups have recently appeared.
Social TV has been around for more than 10 years already but not till the rise of social
networks it has become feasible, since it already encourages constant connection
between members of the network and the creation of likely minded groups. Today‘s 1828 years old access the internet more often than they watch television and a growing
number among them is interested in having more social features integrated into their
TV-experience. Furthermore 23 % of U.S. broadband users want to view online content
from sites like YouTube or Flickr on their TVs. 80
Social television is connecting viewers with their friends, families and people with same
interests giving them a space to discuss and exchange recommendations. But how
should this interaction be provoked? Demanding from the user to sit in front of his/her
TV-Set using mouse and keyboard for interaction does not sound like the best solution.
With Sonys release of its Playstation Move Controller all three major gaming platforms
(Sony Playstation, Microsoft XBOX and Nintendo Wii) are now using alternative
haptical user interfaces Additional drivers to use the Nintendo‘s Wii controller on Mac,
PC or even on a Smartphone already exist for years 81 , Microsoft‘s Kinect has been
reported to be hacked just recently82 and an open source solution for using Sony‘s Move
controller on PCs83 is on its way opening up an interesting research field of how to use
these controllers as interaction devices for other purposes like controlling Social TV
content.
3.4.4 Social Gaming
Social Gaming is a term for games that are based on social interaction. By augmenting
the game logic with social aspects players have to deal with each other in various ways
to advance throughout the game. While social aspects have been part of massively
multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft for quite a
while already, the rise of Facebook and Co created the ground for a new field of games
with social interaction as the main focus.
52% of the US adult population plays online games whereas 21% of this group is
playing on a regular basis. 84 Just recently EA-Games announced the signing of a
contract for five year partnership with facebook, producing online games for the world´s
biggest social online platform using the new Facebook Credits system 85. Playfish86 and
Zynga 87 are also sound examples of game development agencies that develop social
games and use online social networks (Facebook, myspace, etc.) as their main
distribution channels.
While games in 2009 were often rough-hewn affairs, with a focus on often-spammy
viral techniques, 2010 has seen rapidly improving production values with the market
being taken over by international companies like Disney88 and games like Farmville are
played by millions of people.
80
http://www.parksassociates.com/press/press_releases/2009/mar10-socialnetworking.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_2102972_control-computer-wii-remote.html
82
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/10/open-source-kinect-camera-driver-now-available-for-download/
83
http://code.google.com/p/moveonpc/
84
http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Nielsen%20Apps%20Report.pdf
85
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1038
86
http://www.playfish.com/
87
http://www.zynga.com/
88
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/playdom-acquired-by-disney-for-up-to-763-2-million/
81
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For 2010 the sales volume of Social Gaming is expected to reach one billion US dollar,
still a small number compared to the 19 billion dollar being awaited for the whole
global online gaming market. But keeping in mind that last year´s sales volume only
reached 500 million and in 2008 it only were a mere 100 million the tremendous speed
of the growth of the social online gaming market becomes visible. 89 But these numbers
also make an underlying problem of the social gaming market visible. Big companies,
with the expectations of gaining high profit, are pumping a lot of capital into this sector.
Some analysts already fear that a bubble is being created that sooner or later is going to
pop90. Research projects aiming at the Social gaming market should keep an eye on
dissemination possibilities beside of the usual distribution channels (Facebook and Co.)
as well.
89
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/06/the-online-games-market-was-worth-15-billion-in-2009-and-willgrow-to-20-billion-in-2010/
90
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/17/social-gaming-hi5/
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4 Results from the Concertation Meetings
In order to collect, analyse and categorise the different scientific areas that are covered
by current and evolving Network Media projects and clusters a number of
questionnaires have been distributed during the Concertation Meetings. This chapter
summarizes the major results.
4.1 Spring 2010 Concertation Questionnaire for Research
Challenges
In order to collect information about the running and new projects, a questionnaire was
prepared after a number of PhC and a physical meeting of the nextMEDIA beneficiaries
and distributed on the 3rd of February 2010, during the project presentation at the
concertation plenary session.
Overall, 18 projects returned the questionnaire completed. The responses have been
very important for the success of this delivering. By collecting and analysing the
responses we were able to understand better the current situation in Networked Media
research area and try to coordinate the projects of the unit to overcome the various
obstacles.
In order to keeps each cluster informed about FIA activities that lay in the area of their
interest, the nextMEDIA consortium has collected, analysed and categorised the
different scientific and research areas that are covered by current and evolving Network
Media clusters. From the questionnaires results, ―content-aware networking‖ is a very
important area, which is partially tackled by the Future Media Networks cluster, but is
also considered by the FCN and the MANA FIA groups, and the ―Search Engines‖ is
another key area of the Future Internet, which is also considered by the FISO FIA group.
Therefore apart from the plenary session presentation, a least one nextMEDIA delegate
participated at each cluster in order to follow the discussions and collect the projects‘
research agendas and concerns.
From the analysis of the results (Figure 31), we see that a large number of projects are
in one way or another associated with the topic ―Architectures and technologies for
converged and scalable networking‖ (10 projects), followed by the ―Architectures for
massive content distribution‖ and the ―Content Streaming‖ topics (8 projects). ―Content
Aware Networks‖, ―Optimised Quality of experience‖ and ―New Media‖ follow with 7
representing projects.
As ―Expected project impact‖ from the projects (Figure 32), the most popular reply was
―Reinforced of industry in networking and delivery of multimedia content,‖ with 14
votes, followed by ―Wider market opportunities, including for content-related SMEs‖
with 10 votes and ―Reinforced of industry in multimedia content services‖ with 9 votes.
All the results may be found in the following figures and tables.
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Research Challenges Votes
Architectures and technologies for converged and scalable …
Streaming Content
Architectures for massive content distribution
New Media
Optimised quality of experience
Content aware networks
Social Networking
Enchancement of real time rendering of complex scenes
Content aware routing
Architectures for 3D prossesing
Enchancement of 3D content representation
Enhancement of 3D coding
Enhancement of multi view point coding
Optimised storage, caching, repositories
Architectures for 3D augmented worlds
Enhancement of 2D scalable video coding
Applications beyond Games
Enchancement of beyond HDTV coding and electronic cinema
Content Recommendation Systems
Optimised content searching, finding and retrieval
Optimised searching based on contextual information
Optimised searching based on user feedback
Optimised filtering, aggregation
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Figure 31: Research Challenges Votes on the Questionnaire
Expected Impact Votes
Reinforced of industry in networking and delivery of multimedia content
Wider market opportunities, including for content-related SMEs
Reinforced of industry in multimedia content services
Global standards and European IPRs reflecting federated and coherent roadmaps
Innovative business and societal applications (e.g. games, entertainment,…
Reinforced of industry in 3D media Internet technologies
Wider uptake of networked and collaborative platforms based on a '3D media …
Strengthened European industry in multimedia experiences beyond HDTV
Reinforced positioning of industry in Europe in networked search
Enhanced Quality of life for Citizens
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Figure 32: Expected Impact Votes on the Questionnaire
The questionnaire and detailed results of Spring 2010 concertation meeting are available
as Annex 1.
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4.2 Fall 2010 Concertation Questionnaire for Standardisation
In order to collect information about the will of the various projects to contribute to
standards a new questionnaire was prepared and distributed on the 29th of November
2010, during the project presentation at the concertation plenary session.
Overall, 24 questionnaires were returned completed. The responses show that there is a
great fragmentation not only at the areas that various projects aim to contribute, but also
to the standardization bodies that various projects target.
Quality of experience
4%
Optimised searching
2%
Social Networking
2%
Multi view point coding
2%
Streaming Content
14%
Beyond HDTV /electronic
cinema
4%
3D content representation
4%
3D coding
4%
Rendering of complex scenes
4%
Content aware networks
13%
Contextual based Searching
4%
Architectures for massive
content distribution
11%
Architectures for 3D
augmented worlds
4%
Storage, caching, repositories
5%
Content Filtering, aggregation
5%
Content aware routing
5%
Content searching, finding &
retrieval
7%
Architectures for converged
networking
9%
Figure 33: Research area of interest in Standardisation
As it is shown in Figure 33, there are many research areas which projects are aiming to
contribute to standards. Among them, Streaming Content has received the highest score
(14%) followed by Content Aware Networks (13%), Architectures for Massive content
distribution (11%), Architectures for Converged Networks (9%) and Content Searching
and Retrieval (7%). More specific areas received lower marks (e.g. Content aware
routing received just 5%).
Moreover the projects interest towards various standardization bodies is also
fragmented. As shown in Figure 34, IETF is the standardisation body that receives the
interest of most projects (32%) followed by ETSI (21%) and MPEG (19%). This may
be due to the fact that IETF is an international standardization body (while for instance
ETSI is European) and there is no fee for been a member or submitting an Internet draft.
Another reason may be that IETF is targeted to Internet protocols, while the other
standardization bodies have a broader scope.
nextMedia has started to analyse the European participation and contribution to IETF.
As it may be seen in Annex II (Section 8.2), Cisco is by far dominating the RFCs (~290
authors). At the second position would be the combination of Alcatel, Lucent and Belllabs (all together ~120), followed by IBM (~100), Microsoft (~80), BBN (~79) and
Ericsson (~77). Moreover overall, US owns the majority of the accepted Request For
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Comments (RFC) documents (with 900), while Europe follows (with 720). However, if
we consider that Europe started contributing after 1987, then we can see that Europe‘s
contribution the last couple of years is really significant.
ITU
9%
ISO\IEC
3%
IEEE DVB
3% 4%
IETF
32%
W3C
9%
MPEG
19%
ETSI
21%
Figure 34: Targeted Standardisation Bodies
On the other hand, in order to further coordinate contributions to standardization bodies,
we have grouped the areas of research which could lead to standardization activties and
we have concluded to Figure 35. There it is shown that various architectural issues
receive the highest interest (25%) followed by the Streaming Content & Content Aware
Routing (21%) and Content Aware Networks & Caching (19%).
New Media Experience
9%
3D coding, representation and
rendering
13%
Architectural Issues
25%
Searching & Retrieval
13%
Streaming Content, Content
Aware Routing
21%
Content Aware Networks &
Caching
19%
Figure 35: Grouping of research area of interest in Standardisation
In order to coordinate the projects towards standardization, the nextMedia project has
started specific pre-standardization activities.

The FIArch Group, which is coordinated and leaded by nextMedia targets the
Future Internet Architecture. So far, the group has created a document
describing the Current Internet Fundamental Limitations and the Design
Objectives of Future Internet [146]. The next steps will be the Design Principles
of the Future Internet. With this activity, nextMedia mainly targets the
Architectural Issues pre-standardization activities.
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
The Future Media Internet Architecture Think Tank (FMIA-TT), which is
created, coordinated and leaded by nextMedia targets the Future media Internet
Architecture and various Streaming Content & Content Aware Routing issues.
So far, the group has created a white paper describing the Future Media Internet
Reference Model [146]. The next steps will be to collect feedback from
industrial and academic experts and proceed towards an open workshop,
presenting the reference model to all interested projects of the Unit.

In order to face the Content Aware Networks & Caching issues, nextMedia
participated in the next IETF meeting in Prague in order to follow the discussion
on the Content Delivery Networks Interconnection (CDNI) BOF meeting which
may lead to a new IETF workgroup, where interested projects of the Unit may
contribute.

NextMEDIA became a part of the FISA standardisation support community, which
groups seven coordination projects under FP7. The objective of this group is to
define a shared action plan to support standardisation activities within the FIA and
help FIA projects in their standardisation actions. Through the FISA support group,
nextMEDIA will increase the efficiency of R&D projects standardisation activities
by
o Providing direction to existing pre-standardisation initiatives (draft version
can be found in Annex III)
o Creating transversal liaison between FIA communities and projects
o Identifying and advertising existing and foreseen standardisation activities.
o Encouraging cooperation and building synergies in FIA activities
o Facilitating the dissemination of project results to wider community,
particularly industry
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5 Conclusions
This deliverable is the 3rd outcome of the WP2 ―Coordination of the activities of the
cluster towards the FIA‖. The WP2 aims to collect, analyse and categorise the different
scientific areas that are covered by current and evolving Network Media clusters in
order to achieve their objectives in view of the Future Internet era. The deliverable
provides a study of the research covered by the running and newly started projects of
the unit, the relevant state-of the art and the business sectors they cover, in relation with
the FIA activities.
Taking into account also the market trends and potential business targets, we may
define the roadmap shown in Figure 36. Of course there are interrelations between the
different research challenges and advances in one area may pose advances in other.
Moreover, there will always be the innovations and the early adopters, but in general we
conclude that Future Media Internet in the way that we have defined here will be a
reality by 2020-2022.
2015
2020
Content Centric Networking
Content Awareness
Location Awareness
Network Awareness
Content-Aware Routing
Content-Aware Caching
Content Delivery
Content Encoding
Content Adaptation
Content Enrichment
Content Personalisation
3D Content Creation
3D Capturing
3D Authoring
3D Coding
3D Rendering
Content Searching
Multimedia Indexing
Distributed searching
3D Objects searching
Annotation
3D User Interfaces
Immersive Environments
Virtual Worlds
3D Navigation
Figure 36: Networked Media Research Challenges related to FMI
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As conclusions we may highlight the current research challenges related to the FMI
from all the clusters in the following:

Content Centric Networking, including content location awareness, contentaware caching and routing (expected in market by 2017-2022)

Content Delivery, including encoding, in the network content adaptation,
enrichment & personalisation to achieve better Quality of Experience (expected
in market by 2016-2021)

3D Content Creation including capturing, authoring, compression, coding &
Rendering (expected in market by 2019-2024)

Content Searching & Retrieval including content-based large scale multimedia
indexing, annotation and content-aware and (3D) object searching (expected in
market by 2015-2020)

3D User Interfaces including immersive environments/applications, virtual
world and 3D Navigation (expected in market by 2020-2025)
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Technologies. Sept. 2008, pp. 433 – 438.
[109] Oscar Mayora, Petros Daras, Marianna Panebarco, Nick Achilleopoulos, Peter
Stollenmayer, Doug Williams, Federico Alvarez, Elias Kalapanidas, Nadia
Magnenat-Thalmann, Carmen Guerrero, Michiel Pelt, Tim McGrath, Eugenia
Fuenmayor, David Salama, Alex Shani, Jean-Yves Le Moine, User Centric
Media in the Future Internet: Trends and Challenges ACM DIMEA conference.
Athens, September 2008
[110] Luigi Lancieri and Nicolas Durand: ―Internet User Behavior: Compared Study
of the Access Traces and Application to the Discovery of Communities‖. IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics—Part A: Systems And
Humans, Vol. 36, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 208-219.
[111] Murata, T. ―Discovery of User Communities from Web Audience Measurement
Data‖; Proceedings. IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web
Intelligence, 2004. WI 2004. 20-24 Sept. 2004, pp. 673 – 676.
[112] Murata, T.; Saito, K.; ―Extracting Keywords of Web Users' Interests and
Visualizing their Routine Visits‖. 9th International Conference on Control,
Automation, Robotics and Vision, 2006. ICARCV '06, 5-8 Dec. 2006. pp. 1 – 6.
[113] Murata, T.; Saito, K ―Extracting Users' Interests from Web Log Data‖;
IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, 2006. WI 2006.
18-22 Dec. 2006 pp. 343 – 346.
[114] Carey, M.J.; Tattersall, G.D.; Lloyd-Thomas, H.; Russell, M.J ―Inferring identity
from user behaviour‖ Carey, M.J.; Tattersall, G.D.; Lloyd-Thomas, H.; Russell,
M.J.; Vision, Image and Signal Processing, IEE Proceedings - Volume 150,
Issue 6, 15 Dec. 2003, pp. 383 – 388.
[115] D. Boutemedjet, S.; Ziou ―A Graphical Model for Context-Aware Visual
Content Recommendation‖, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Volume 10,
Issue 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 52 – 62
[116] K. Yu, A. Schwaighofer, V. Tresp, X. Xu, and H.-P. Kriegel, ―Probabilistic
memory-based collaborative filtering,‖ IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and
Data Engineering, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 56–69, Jan. 2004.
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[117] R. Jin, L. Si, C. Zhai, ―A study of mixture models for collaborative filtering,‖
The Journal of Information Retrieval, vol. 9, no. 3, 2006, pp. 357–382.
[118] P. Melville, R. J. Mooney, and R. Nagarajan, ―Content-boosted collaborative
filtering for improved recommendations‖. Proceedings of the 18th National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2002, pp. 187–192
[119] K. Enami, ―Study Group report on the economic impact of Universal
Communications,‖ NEM Summit, St. Malo, Oct. 2008
[120] T. Asaro, ―Content Aware Storage -- Vendor Lock-in is Re-born,‖
http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/2173
[121] Market Research Media ―Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): U.S. Government
Market
Forecast
2010-2015″
http://www.marketresearchmedia.com/
2010/02/17/ deep-packet-inspection-market/
[122] Medienstudie 2007, IBM Business Consulting Service
[123] nextMedia, D2.2 ―Report on current research and business targets V2.0,‖ Dec
2010
[124] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Internet Based Video Services‖, 2008
[125] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Trends in Consumer Technology: Defining & Sizing
the Market‖, 2007
[126] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Entertainment 2.0 in Europe‖, 2009
[127] Parks Associates, ―Company Financials‖, 2007
[128] Parks Associates, ―IPTV in Europe: TV in a Hyper-competitive Market,‖ 2007
[129] Parks Associates, ―Know Thy Customer: Customer Analytics to Drive Valueadded Services,― June 2008
[130] Parks Associates, ―Europe: Home Network Update‖ 2008
[131] iSuppli, ―Next Gen. DVD Players,‖ Consumer Platforms, April 2008
[132] iSuppli, ―Next Gen. DTV Semiconductors,‖ Consumer Platforms, May 2008
[133] ABI Research, ―Home Media Devices‖, 2007
[134] K. Enami, ―Ultra-Realistic Communications Forum incremental R&D
roadmap‖, Nem Summit, St. Malo, 2009
[135] http://www.virtualworldsmanagement.com/2009/youth-01-26-2009.html
[136] Parks Associates, ―Virtual Worlds: The Internet of Avatars,‖ 2008
[137] Parks Associates, ―Electronics Gaming in the Digital Home: A survey of 1985
Internet gamers,‖ 2008
[138] Parks Associates, ―Customer Analysis to drive value-added services,‖ June 2008
[139] Steven Soranno: The 21st Century Office Is Green, Costing Less, 2009
eMarketer, July 2007
[140] IDC consultancy report,‖The expanding Digital Universe‖ March 2007
[141] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Internet Based Video Services‖, 2005
[142] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Profile of PC Usage, a survey of 2682 PC Users with
Internet‖, 2007
[143] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Digital Entertainment in the Home‖, 2005
[144] PARKS ASSOCIATES, ―Trends in Consumer Technology: Defining & Sizing
the Market‖, 2006
[145] Lombard, M., & Ditton, T. At the heart of it all: The concept of presence.
Journal of commter-mediated communication. 1997.
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[146] FIArch Group, ―Fundamental Limitations of Current Internet and the path to
Future Internet,‖ December 2010
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7 ANNEX I: Spring 2010 Concertation Meeting
7.1 Questionnaire
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7.2 Detailed Results
1
1
1
Summary
1
COAST
1
SEA
NAPA-WINE
1
COMET
1
BEAMING
1
3DPhone
ENVISION
1
TA2
MEDIAPRO
1
SARACEN
1
I-SEARCH
1
DIOMEDES
iNEM4U
1
OMWeb
OCEAN
CNG
2020 3D Media
Fascinate
Analytically the results are shown in the following table.
Project Budget (please tick only one):
Less than 3M€
Between 3M and 6M€
Between 6M and 9M€
More than 9M€
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
10
0
4
Research Areas (please tick all applicable)
Architectures and technologies for converged and scalable networking
Architectures for massive content distribution
Architectures for 3D prossesing
Architectures for 3D augmented worlds
Content aware networks
Content aware routing
Streaming Content
Optimised storage, caching, repositories
Optimised filtering, aggregation
Optimised content searching, finding and retrieval
Content Recommendation Systems
Optimised searching based on user feedback
Optimised searching based on contextual information
Enhancement of 2D scalable video coding
Enhancement of multi view point coding
Enhancement of 3D coding
Enchancement of 3D content representation
Enchancement of real time rendering of complex scenes
Enchancement of beyond HDTV coding and electronic cinema
Optimised quality of experience
New Media
Social Networking
Applications beyond Games, Please name………..
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
11
8
5
4
7
5
8
4
1
2
2
1
1
3
4
4
4
5
2
7
7
5
2
Enhance communication among groups of people separated in spaced time
Expected Impact (please tick all applicable):
Reinforced of industry in networking and delivery of multimedia content
1
1
Reinforced of industry in multimedia content services
1
Reinforced of industry in 3D media Internet technologies
1
Reinforced positioning of industry in Europe in networked search
Strengthened European industry in multimedia experiences beyond HDTV
1
1
Wider uptake of networked and collaborative platforms based on a '3D media Internet'
Global standards and European IPRs reflecting federated and coherent roadmaps 1
1
Wider market opportunities, including for content-related SMEs
1
1
Innovative business and societal applications (e.g. games, entertainment, education,1 culture)
Other. Please specify……………..
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Enhanced Quality of life for Citizens
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14
9
5
2
3
3
7
10
5
1
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8 ANNEX II: Fall 2010 Concertation Meeting
8.1 Questionnaire
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8.1 Detailed Results
Analytically the results are shown in the following tables.
#
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Research Area of Interest in Standardisation
Streaming Content
Content aware networks
Architectures for massive content distribution
Content searching, finding & retrieval
Architectures for converged networking
Content aware routing
Content Filtering, aggregation
Storage, caching, repositories
Architectures for 3D augmented worlds
Contextual based Searching
Rendering of complex scenes
3D coding
3D content representation
Beyond HDTV /electronic cinema
Quality of experience
Optimised searching
Social Networking
Multi view point coding
hits
7
6
5
4
4
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
1
Table 7. Analysis of research interests for standardisation in Future Internet
Standardisation Bodies
IETF
MPEG
ETSI
W3C
ITU
ISO\IEC
IEEE
DVB
Number of actions
24
12
11
5
5
2
2
2
Table 8. Standardisation actions carried out by projects
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8.2 IETF statistics
Source www.ietf.org
Figure 37: Number of Internet draft authors per Company
Cisco is by far dominating the RFCs (~290 authors). At the second position would be
the combination of Alcatel, Lucent and Bell-labs (all together ~120), followed by IBM
(~100), Microsoft (~80), BBN (~79) and Ericsson (~77).
Figure 38: Number of RFCs per continent
Figure 39: Number of RFCs (Considering EU as a single country)
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Figure 40: Number of recent RFCs (Considering EU as a single country)
Figure 41: Number of IETF drafts (Considering EU as a single country)
Figure 42: Comparison of continents over the Years
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9 ANNEX II: FISA Standardisation Support Group
9.1 Existing pre-standardisation initiatives related to future internet
ETSI, European Telecommunications Standards
Institute
http://www.etsi.org
Description: ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and
Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged,
broadcast and internet technologies. We are officially recognized by the European
Union as a European Standards Organization. The high quality of our work and our
open approach to standardization has helped us evolve into a European roots - global
branches operation with a solid reputation for technical excellence. ETSI is a not-forprofit organization with more than 700 ETSI member organizations drawn from 62
countries across 5 continents world-wide. High quality and low time-to-market are our
constant aims and we continually strive to collaborate with research bodies. We are
active in vital complementary areas such as interoperability and we offer event services
related to standardisation including forum hosting. Our international reputation is built
on openness, discussion, consensus and direct input from our members
Existing pre-standardisation support scheme
Main working groups/areas
ISGs (Industry Specification Groups) offer a very
Related to FI/IoT: TC M2M,
quick and easy alternative to the creation of industry TISPAN, ERM, ITS, MCD,
fora, and are focused on a very specific activity. Yet MTS, CLOUD, EHEALTH,
they do have their own membership, which may
SCP, ISG AFI and 3GPP.
consist of both ETSI Members and Non-members
http://portal.etsi.org
(under certain conditions), they have their own
Aeronautical, Broadband
voting rules, they decide their own work
Wireless Access, Broadcast,
programme, and approve their own deliverables.
DECT, Digital Mobile Radio,
EMC, Emergency, Fixed-line
Access, Environmental Aspects,
Existing ISGs
 Open Radio equipment Interface (ORI)
Grid and cloud computing,
 Autonomic network engineering for the self- Human Factors, Intelligent
managing Future Internet (AFI)
Transport, M2M, Maritime,
 Mobile Thin Client Computing (MTC)
Media Content Distribution,
 Identity management for Network Services
Medical, Mobile, Next
(INS)
Generation Networks, OSA,
 Measurement Ontology for IP traffic (MOI)
OSS, Powerline, Protocol
 Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)
Specification, Quality of Service,
Quantum Key Distribution,
Radio, Regulation & Legislation,
Safety, Satellite, Security, Smart
Cards, Testing, TETRA
Open Grid Forum
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Description
The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading
the global standardization effort for grid computing. The work of OGF is carried out
through community-initiated working groups, which develop standards and
specifications in cooperation with other leading standards organizations, software
vendors, and users.
More information on http://www.ogf.org
Existing pre-standardisation support
Main working groups/areas
scheme
eResearch Function
Standards are developed within Working
Grid Interoperation Now Community
Groups. There are normally two or three coGroup,
chairs of any given working group; working
Remote Instrumentation Services in
groups are categorized into Areas. Areas allow Grid Environment, Grid Information
OGF to group together activities that are
Retrieval,
related to each other. Currently the OGF has
Preservation Environments
the following areas: Applications,
Enterprise Function
Architecture, Compute, Data, Infrastructure,
Enterprise Grids Requirements,
Management and Security. In the OGF
Storage Networking Community
document process the standards council plays
Group, Telecomm Community Group
the role of final reviewer of all documents,
Standards Function
making sure that the documents produced by
The Standards function of OGF is
working groups fulfill the requirements of the responsible for development of
organization to become part of the OGF
architectures, specifications, roadmaps
document series.
and glossaries for distributed
After one year of being a Proposed
computing software through OGF
Recommendation, a working group can
working groups and through the
publish a document describing the various
application of the OGF document
implementations of a specification and, more
process. The Standards function
importantly, their interoperability or
includes the management of technical
conformance with the specification. Once this liaisons with other Standards
has happened, a Proposed Recommendation is Development Organizations (SDOs)
promoted to a full Recommendation
and to promote the adoption of
document.
standardized and interoperable
distributed computing software.
SNIA
Description
Incorporated in December 1997, the SNIA is a registered non-profit trade association.
The members are dedicated to developing and promoting standards, technologies, and
educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. The
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SNIA works toward this goal by forming and sponsoring Technical Work Groups
(TWGs), producing (with our strategic partner Computerworld) the Storage Networking
World Conference series, building and maintaining a vendor neutral Technology Center
in Colorado Springs, and promoting activities that expand the breadth and quality of the
storage and information management market
Existing pre-standardisation support scheme
SNIA standards are primarily related to data,
storage, and information management and
address such challenges as interoperability,
usability, and complexity. They start out in
SNIA-sponsored Technical Working Groups
(member collaboration efforts centering on best
practices) or as contributions from independent
vendor collaborations, and are subject to a
rigorous processes involving checks and
technology reviews by SNIA‘s Members,
Technical Council, and Board of Directors,
conducted under provisions that respect and
protect intellectual property and address
licensing of essential claims.
A SNIA standard that has completed these
processes is labeled a SNIA Technical Position,
which signifies that the SNIA endorses and
recommends the ideas, methodologies, and
technologies described.
The SNIA may take SNIA Technical Positions
to ANSI, ISO, and other national and
international standards bodies for additional
endorsement.
Main working groups/areas
SNIA Forums and Initiatives
primarily focus on technology
promotion and technical marketing
activities. Forums do not develop
technologies or specifications,
though Initiatives can. SNIA's
Forums and Initiatives include the
Cloud Storage Initiative, the Data
Protection and Capacity
Optimization Committee, the
Ethernet Storage Forum, the Green
Storage Initiative, Storage
Management Initiative, Solid State
Storage Initiative, the Storage
Security Industry Forum and the
XAM Initiative and
WholeSale Application Community
Description
WAC’s objective is to commercialize products for its member companies. Open Web standards
are utilized in support of this commercialization effort as long as such adoption does not
impact required time to market. The WAC widget specification is therefore based on W3C and
OMTP standards to the greatest extent possible, given that these standards were developed in
parallel to the WAC’s specifications.
Existing pre-standardisation support
scheme
Add here a description of prestandardisation
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Main working groups/areas
List here the relevant working groups or
working areas
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World Wide Web Consortium
Description
The W3C mission is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols
and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Below we discuss important
aspects of this mission, all of which further W3C's vision of One Web.
Existing pre-standardisation support
Main working groups/areas
List here the relevant working groups or
scheme
Add here a description of pre-standardisation working areas
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP
Description
The original scope of 3GPP was to produce Technical Specifications and Technical Reports for a
3G Mobile System based on evolved GSM core networks and the radio access technologies
that they support (i.e., Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA) both Frequency Division
Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) modes).
Existing pre-standardisation support
scheme
Add here a description of prestandardisation
Main working groups/areas
List here the relevant working groups or
working areas
Open Mobile Alliance
Description
The mission of the Open Mobile Alliance is to facilitate global user adoption of mobile
data services by specifying market driven mobile service enablers that ensure service
interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators, and networks
while allowing businesses to compete through innovation and differentiation.
Existing pre-standardisation support
Main working groups/areas
List here the relevant working groups or
scheme
Add here a description of preworking areas
standardisation
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Linux Foundation
Description
LiMo Foundation is an industry consortium dedicated to creating the first truly open,
hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. Backing from
major industry leaders puts LiMo at the Heart of the Mobile Industry and makes LiMo
the unifying force in Mobile Linux.
The mission of the LiMo Foundation is to create an open, Linux-based software
platform for use by the whole global industry to produce mobile devices through a
balanced and transparent contribution process enabling a rich ecosystem of
differentiated products, applications, and services from device manufacturers, operators,
ISVs and integrators.
Existing pre-standardisation support scheme
Android
Main working groups/areas
List here the relevant working
groups or working areas
Symbian foundation
Description
The Symbian Foundation provides, manages and unifies the platform for download and
development. With the Symbian platform source code published under the Eclipse Public
License the entire platform is available to all for free, bringing additional innovation and more
frequent and widely-sourced code and feature contributions; and engaging an even broader
community in future development.
Existing pre-standardisation support
scheme
Add here a description of prestandardisation
Main working groups/areas
List here the relevant working groups or
working areas
IETF, The Internet Engineering Task Force
http://www.ietf.org
Description: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international
community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with
the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is
open to any interested individual. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its
working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g., routing, transport,
security, etc.). Much of the work is handled via mailing lists. The IETF holds meetings
three times per year.
The IETF working groups are grouped into areas, and managed by Area Directors, or
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ADs. The ADs are members of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).
Providing architectural oversight is the Internet Architecture Board, (IAB). The IAB
also adjudicates appeals when someone complains that the IESG has failed. The IAB
and IESG are chartered by the Internet Society (ISOC) for these purposes. The General
Area Director also serves as the chair of the IESG and of the IETF, and is an ex-officio
member of the IAB.
Existing pre-standardisation support scheme
Main working groups/areas
IETF Working Groups (WGs) are the primary  6lowpan - IPv6 over Low
mechanism for development of IETF specifications
power WPAN
and guidelines, many of which are intended to be  6man - IPv6 Maintenance
standards or recommendations. Working Groups are  Ancp - Access Node Control
typically created to address a specific problem or to
Protocol
produce one or more specific deliverables (a  Autoconf - Ad-Hoc Network
guideline, standards specification, etc.). Working
Autoconfiguration
Groups are generally expected to be short-lived in  Csi - Cga & Send
nature.
Upon completion of its goals and
maIntenance
achievement of its objectives, the Working Group is  Dhc - Dynamic Host
terminated. Each Working Group has a charter.
Configuration
WG charters state the scope of work for group, and
 Dnsext - DNS Extensions
lay out goals and milestones that show how this
 Hip - Host Identity Protocol
work will be completed. More information about
formation of IETF working groups can be found at  Intarea - Internet Area
Working Group
http://www.ietf.org/wg/
 Ipdvb - IP over DVB
 l2tpext - Layer Two
Tunneling Protocol
Extensions
 lisp - Locator/ID Separation
Protocol
 mext - Mobility EXTensions
for IPv6
 mif - Multiple Interfaces
 mip4 - Mobility for IPv4
 mipshop - Mobility for IP:
Performance, Signaling and
Handoff Optimization
 multimob - Multicast
Mobility
 netext - Network-Based
Mobility Extensions
 netlmm - Network-based
Localized Mobility
Management
 ntp - Network Time Protocol
 pppext - Point-to-Point
Protocol Extensions
 savi - Source Address
Validation Improvements
 shim6 - Site Multihoming by
IPv6 Intermediation
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 softwire - Softwires
 tictoc - Timing over IP
Connection and Transfer of
Clock
 trill - Transparent
Interconnection of Lots of
Links
IRTF, The Internet Research Task Force
http://www.irtf.org/
Description: The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is a sister group to the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). Its stated mission is ―To promote research of
importance to the evolution of the future Internet by creating focused, long-term and
small Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications,
architecture and technology‖.
Existing pre-standardisation support scheme
Main working groups/areas
The IRTF Research Groups work on topics related  Anti-Spam Research Group
to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and
(ASRG)
technology. Research Groups are expected to have  Crypto Forum Research
the stable long term (with respect to the lifetime of
Group
the Research Group) membership needed to  Delay-Tolerant Networking
promote the development of research collaboration
Research Group (DTNRG)
and teamwork in exploring research issues.  Host Identity Protocol (HIP)
Participation is by individual contributors, rather
Research Group
than by representatives of organizations.
 Internet Congestion Control
Research Group
The IRTF is managed by the IRTF Chair in  IP Mobility Optimizations
consultation with the Internet Research Steering
(Mob Opts) Research Group
Group (IRSG). A Research Group may be  Network Management
established at the initiative of an individual or group
Research Group Charter
of individuals. Anyone interested in creating an
(NMRG)
IRTF Research Group must submit a charter for the  Peer-to-Peer Research Group
proposed group to the IRTF Chair along with a list  Public Key Next-Generation
of proposed founding members. The charter will be
Research Group
reviewed by the IRSG and then forwarded to the  Routing Research Group
IAB for approval.
 Scalable Adaptive Multicast
Research Group
More information about formation of IRTF working  Transport Modeling Research
groups can be found at http://www.irtf.org/
Group
 Virtual Networks Research
Group (VNRG)
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