Governance of digital content in the era of mass participation

The realm of digital media is undergoing fundamental changes as it moves from mass media to an era of mass participation. This emergence of content created by the masses requires to re-consider the conventional intellectual property rights framework. Free content and protected content co-exist (in the Dark/Light Web).     

An “S-string” scheme for business-oriented peer-to-peer networks

In this paper we introduce and analyze S-string, a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payment-based mechanism. S-string enhances the functionality of P2P networks by promoting cooperation among peers, rewarding them to participate in sharing objects, and encouraging them to reduce their downtimes. It also imposes tougher punishment procedures on peers when they do not fulfill their obligations to others. S-string supports the role of media entities by taking into consideration their concerns about the distribution of digital media contents or objects in a lawful and profitable manner. We demonstrate the performance results of our proposed mechanism via simulation.     

Laying the foundations for a World Wide Argument Web

This paper lays theoretical and software foundations for a World Wide Argument Web (WWAW): a large-scale Web of inter-connected arguments posted by individuals to express their opinions in a structured manner. First, we extend the recently proposed Argument Interchange Format (AIF) to express arguments with a structure based on Walton's theory of argumentation schemes. Then, we describe an implementation of this ontology using the RDF Schema Semantic Web-based ontology language, and demonstrate how our ontology enables the representation of networks of arguments on the Semantic Web. Finally, we present a pilot Semantic Web-based system, ArgDF, through which users can create arguments using different argumentation schemes and can query arguments using a Semantic Web query language. Manipulation of existing arguments is also handled in ArgDF: users can attack or support parts of existing arguments, or use existing parts of an argument in the creation of new arguments. ArgDF also enables users to create new argumentation schemes. As such, ArgDF is an open platform not only for representing arguments, but also for building interlinked and dynamic argument networks on the Semantic Web. This initial public-domain tool is intended to seed a variety of future applications for authoring, linking, navigating, searching, and evaluating arguments on the Web.     

Extracting significant Website Key Objects: A Semantic Web mining approach

Web mining has been traditionally used in different application domains in order to enhance the content that Web users are accessing. Likewise, Website administrators are interested in finding new approaches to improve their Website content according to their users' preferences. Furthermore, the Semantic Web has been considered as an alternative to represent Web content in a way which can be used by intelligent techniques to provide the organization, meaning, and definition of Web content. In this work, we define the Website Key Object Extraction problem, whose solution is based on a Semantic Web mining approach to extract from a given Website core ontology, new relations between objects according to their Web user interests. This methodology was applied to a real Website, whose results showed that the automatic extraction of Key Objects is highly competitive against traditional surveys applied to Web users.     

Standards for image annotation using Semantic Web

The impetus behind Semantic Web research remains the vision of supplementing availability with utility; that is, the World Wide Web provides availability of digital media, but the Semantic Web will allow presently available digital media to be used in unseen ways. An example of such an application is multimedia retrieval. At present, there are vast amounts of digital media available on the web. Once this media gets associated with machine-understandable metadata, the web can serve as a potentially unlimited supplier for multimedia web services, which could populate themselves by searching for keywords and subsequently retrieving images or articles, which is precisely the type of system that is proposed in this paper. Such a system requires solid interoperability, a central ontology, semantic agent search capabilities, and standards. Specifically, this paper explores this cross-section of image annotation and Semantic Web services, models the web service components that constitute such a system, discusses the sequential, cooperative execution of these Semantic Web services, and introduces intelligent storage of image semantics as part of a semantic link space.     

Associating consumer perceived value with business models for digital services

As digital services increasingly deal with commodity offerings (i.e., digital content and features that are similar between service providers), service providers are seeking to differentiate themselves with variations in their digital service business models. Research, though, has yet to consider the association of consumer perceived value with digital service business models underlying technological innovations. We seek to demonstrate that consumer value for digital service business models may be quite different even when consumers have similar preferences for standard technology characteristics. In the context of this paper, we specifically consider consumer perceived value associated with Personal Health Records (PHRs) and PHR digital business models, through the use of an integrated latent variable and choice empirical model. We find that although consumer perceived value for PHRs is generally high, when offered a choice between three competing PHR business models, consumers state high value for only two of the business models in the choice set: PHRs offered directly by groups of medical providers and Integrated PHRs. These findings suggest that while perceived value may be high for generally considered digital services, variations in the underlying digital service business models are likely to have significant impacts on consumer valuations of digital services.     

Uncovering hidden maps: Illustrative narratology for digital artists/designers

Interactive narratives have greatly changed our experience with story and storytelling. For a digital artist/designer, learning narrative techniques derived from fiction and film is crucial, as such techniques not only address the audience's reading/viewing habits but also are useful in breaking down a narrative into elements for the process of organizing/programming. This paper introduces an illustrative guide of narratology concepts for digital artists/designers, media students, and the like, and methods of uncovering the “hidden maps” in various kinds of narrative.     

A Web laboratory for software data analysis

We describe two prototypical elements of a World Wide Webbased system for visualization and analysis of data produced in the software development process. Our system incorporates interactive applets and visualization techniques into Web pages. A particularly powerful example of such an applet, SeeSoft^TM, can display thousands of lines of text on a single screen, allowing detection of patterns not discernible directly from the text. In our system, Live Documents replace static statistical tables in ordinary documents by dynamic Webbased documents, in effect allowing the reader to customize the document as it is read. Use of the Web provides several advantages. The tools access data from a very large central data base, instead of requiring that it be downloaded; this ensures that readers are always working with the most uptodate version of the data, and relieves readers of the responsibility of preparing data for their use. The tools encourage collaborative research, as one researcher's observations can easily be replicated and studied in greater detail by other team members. We have found this particularly useful while studying software data as part of a team that includes researchers in computer science, software engineering, and statistics, as well as development managers. Live documents will also help the Web revolutionize scientific publication, as papers published on the Web can contain Java applets that permit readers to confirm the conclusions reached by the authors' statistical analyses.     

A layered architecture for flexible Web service invocation

Web service composition is emerging as an interesting approach to integrate business applications and create intra‐organizational business processes. Single Web services are combined to create a complex Web service that will realize the process business logic. Once the process is created, it is executed by an orchestration engine that invokes individual Web services in the correct order. However, Web services composing the workflow sometimes become unavailable during the run‐time phase, blocking process execution. This paper describes an architecture that allows the flexible orchestration of business processes. With this approach, Web services composing the process can be automatically substituted with other compatible Web services during process execution. A methodology is defined to evaluate Web service compatibility based on interface matching, in order to select substitutable Web services. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deploying and managing Web services: issues, solutions, and directions

Web services are expected to be the key technology in enabling the next installment of the Web in the form of the Service Web. In this paradigm shift, Web services would be treated as first-class objects that can be manipulated much like data is now manipulated using a database management system. Hitherto, Web services have largely been driven by standards. However, there is a strong impetus for defining a solid and integrated foundation that would facilitate the kind of innovations witnessed in other fields, such as databases. This survey focuses on investigating the different research problems, solutions, and directions to deploying Web services that are managed by an integrated Web Service Management System (WSMS). The survey identifies the key features of a WSMS and conducts a comparative study on how current research approaches and projects fit in. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health’s NLM grant 1-R03-LM008140-01.     

A model-driven development framework for enterprise Web services

The growing scale and complexity of the enterprise computing systems under distributed and heterogeneous environments present new challenges to system development, integration, and maintenance. In this paper, we present a model driven Web service development framework to combat these challenges. The framework capitalizes on the unified modeling language (UML) profile for enterprise distributed object computing (EDOC), MDA (model-driven architecture) and Web services. Within the framework, firstly, a general PIM (platform independent models) is created using the EDOC CCA structural specification and CCA choreography specification which defines the general functions of a system. Secondly, the general PIM is broken down into sub-PIMs according to functional decomposition, each of which can provide service independently and will be implemented in a Web service. Thirdly, all of the PIMs are transformed to Web service interface models for publication and invoking. Afterward, transform each PIM to a BPEL specified Web service orchestration model. Finally, supported by model transform techniques, the sub EDOC PIMs are implemented into Web services on specific platforms. Automatic model transformation is the key to this framework, therefore, the transformation from EDOC CCA models to WSDL specified Web service interface models and the transformation from EDOC CCA models to BPEL specified Web service orchestration models are deeply discussed, and the detailed transformation rules are proposed. A case study is also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these rules and the merits of this framework.

SemWebDL: A privacy-preserving Semantic Web infrastructure for digital libraries

Recent advances in digital libraries have been closely intertwined with advances in Internet technologies. With the advent of the Web, digital libraries have been able to reach constituencies previously unanticipated. Because of the wide deployability of Web-accessible digital libraries, the potential for privacy violations has also grown tremendously. The much touted Semantic Web, with its agent, service, and ontology technologies, is slated to take the Web to another qualitative level in advances. Unfortunately, these advances may also open doors for privacy violations in ways never seen before. We propose a Semantic Web infrastructure, called SemWebDL, that enables the dynamic composition of disparate and autonomous digital libraries while preserving user privacy. In the proposed infrastructure, users will be able to pose more qualitative queries that may require the ad hoc collaboration of multiple digital libraries. In addition to the Semantic Web-based infrastructure, the quality of the response would rest on extraneous information in the form of a profile. We introduce the concept of communities to enable subject-based cooperation and search speedup. Further, digital libraries heterogeneity and autonomy are transcended by a layered Web-service-based infrastructure. Semantic Web-based digital library providers would advertise to Web services, which in turn are organized in communities accessed by users. For the purpose of privacy preservation, we devise a three-tier privacy model consisting of user privacy, Web service privacy, and digital library privacy that offers autonomy of perspectives for privacy definition and violation. We propose an approach that seamlessly interoperates with potentially conflicting privacy definitions and policies at the different levels of the Semantic Web-based infrastructure. A key aspect in the approach is the use of reputations for outsourcing Web services. A Web service reputation is associated with its behavior with regard to privacy preservation. We developed a technique that uses attribute ontologies and information flow difference to collect, evaluate, and disseminate the reputation of Web services.     

Simulation-based experimentation for designing reliable and efficient Web service orchestrations in supply chains

The world today is witnessing a growing interest in conducting supply chain business processes electronically using Web services orchestration technology. Fast adoption is often hampered by the need for experimentation to make efficient use of this technology in supply chain processes. In this paper, a simulation-based approach supporting experimentation with the efficiency and reliability of Web service orchestrations in supply chains prior to implementation are presented. The approach simulates the de facto business process specification standard for Web services, BPEL4WS, using Java-based simulation building blocks. A supply chain case study is used to demonstrate and evaluate the approach.     

Wired Worlds: Exploring the Digital Frontier. A pioneering galleryof digital media discovery

The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television is Britain's leading center for lens-based media. To provide a strengthened platform for the 21st Century, the museum created a new flagship gallery that explores and addresses the importance of digital media. “Wired Worlds: Exploring the Digital Frontier” uses innovative presentational and communication approaches to describe the distinctive nature, styles and techniques of digital media. The 500-m ² gallery took nearly three years and $2.2 million to complete. To address the challenges of an evolving field, we adopted an intensive, organic research and development approach. We organized a creative/curatorial project team, 10 contracted international digital media artists and developers, and a London-based design studio. We also consulted with other media professionals, academics and partnership companies     

The ubiquity of discovery

As scientists interested in studying the phenomenon of “intelligence”, we first choose a view of Man, develop a theory of how intelligent behavior is managed, and construct some models which can test and refine that theory. The view we choose is that Man is a processor of symbolic information. The theory is that sophisticated cognitive tasks can be cast as searches or explorations, and that each human possesses (and efficiently accesses) a large body of informal rules of thumb (or heuristics) which constrain his search. The source of what we colloquially call “intelligence” is seen to be very efficient searching of an a priori immense space. Some computational models which incorporate this theory are described. Among them is AM, a computer program that develops new mathematical concepts and formulates conjectures involving them; AM is guided in this exploration by a collection of 250 more or less general heuristic rules. The operational nature of such models allows experiments to be performed upon them, experiments which help us test and develop hypotheses about intelligence. One interesting finding has been the ubiquity of this kind of heuristic guidance: intelligence permeates everyday problem solving and invention, as well as the kind of problem solving and invention that scientists and artists perform. The ultimate goals of this kind of research are (i) to de-mystify the process by which new science and art are created, and (ii) to build tools (computer programs) which enhance man's mental capabilities.     

Harvesting microblogs for contextual music similarity estimation: a co-occurrence-based framework

Microtexts are a valuable, albeit noisy, source to infer collaborative information. As music plays an important role in many human lives, microblogs on music-related activities are available in abundance. This paper investigates different strategies to estimate music similarity from these data sources. In particular, we first present a framework to extract co-occurrence scores between music artists from microblogs and then investigate 12 similarity estimation functions to subsequently derive resemblance scores. We evaluate the approaches on a collection of microblogs crawled from Twitter over a period of 10 months and compare them to standard tf-idf approaches. As evaluation criteria we use precision and recall in an artist retrieval task as well as rank proximity. We show that collaborative chatter on music can be effectively used to develop music artist similarity measures, which are a core part of every music retrieval and recommendation system. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of the “long tail” on retrieval results and investigate whether results are consistent over time, using a second dataset.     

Comparing keyword search to semantic search: a case study in solving crossword puzzles using the Google™ API

Keyword‐based search engines such as Google? index Web pages for human consumption. Sophisticated as such engines have become, surveys indicate almost 25% of Web searchers are unable to find useful results in the first set of URLs returned (Technology Review, March 2004). The lack of machine‐interpretable information on the Web limits software agents from matching human searches to desirable results. Tim Berners‐Lee, inventor of the Web, has architected the Semantic Web in which machine‐interpretable information provides an automated means to traversing the Web. A necessary cornerstone application is the search engine capable of bringing the Semantic Web together into a searchable landscape. We implemented a Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) that performs semantic search, providing predictable and accurate results to queries. To compare keyword search to semantic search, we constructed the Google CruciVerbalist (GCV), which solves crossword puzzles by reformulating clues into Google queries processed via the Google API. Candidate answers are extracted from query results. Integrating GCV with SWSE, we quantitatively show how semantic search improves upon keyword search. Mimicking the human brain's ability to create and traverse relationships between facts, our techniques enable Web applications to ‘think’ using semantic reasoning, opening the door to intelligent search applications that utilize the Semantic Web. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Surfing the Web backwards

``Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.'' Soren Kierkegaard

From a user's perspective, hypertext links on the Web form a directed graph between distinct information sources. We investigate the effects of discovering `backlinks' from Web resources, namely links pointing to the resource. We describe tools for backlink navigation on both the client and server side, using an applet for the client and a module for the Apache Web server. We also discuss possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the World Wide Web.     

Organizing domain-specific information on the Web: An experiment on the Spanish business Web directory

Web directories organize voluminous information into hierarchical structures, helping users to quickly locate relevant information and to support decision-making. The development of existing ontologies and Web directories either relies on expert participation that may not be available or uses automatic approaches that lack precision. As more users access the Web in their native languages, better approaches to organizing and developing non-English Web directories are needed. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic framework, which consists of anchor directory boosting, meta-searching, and heuristic filtering, to construct domain-specific Web directories. Using the framework, we have built a Web directory in the Spanish business (SBiz) domain. Experimental results show that the SBiz Web directory achieved significantly better recall, F-value, efficiency, and satisfaction rating than the benchmark directory. Subjects provided favorable comments on the SBiz Web directory. This research thus contributes to developing a useful framework for organizing domain-specific information on the Web and to providing empirical findings and useful insights for end-users, system developers, and researchers of Web information seeking and knowledge management.