2. Background: Video and the World Wide Web


2. Background: Video and the World Wide Web

World Wide Web browsers and the Internet are becoming the universal tool for information access and management. End-users can read news, manage their bank accounts, search for recipes or instructions, put together an itinerary for their vacation, and perform a large number of information related tasks using the World Wide Web. The web was, in its infancy, providing access to dominantly textual information but as the web has matured, so has multimedia and streaming technologies and the web is now also a tool for end-users to consume digital media. This section discusses some of the characteristics of the World Wide Web that will have the largest impact on video applications and on the databases that support them.

2.1 Network and Device Diversity on the Web

Diversity is a key characteristic of the World Wide Web. The web serves a wide variety of contents to a diverse group of end-users. There is also a significant variety among the computers and networks that constitute the web. Some users access the web using powerful desktops with broadband network access. Other users access web content using a small-screen device having restricted computational power - such as a PDA - using a low bandwidth wireless connection to the Internet. Video database applications on the web need to address these diversities to ensure that video content can be delivered in ways that are beneficial to the end-users.

2.2 Web Applications - Interactive and Dynamic

The World Wide Web is based on the hypermedia paradigm and is truly interactive in nature. Web content is usually structured in information nodes that are connected by hyperlinks. End-users have the freedom to select which hyperlinks to follow and which to ignore. Many hyperlinks give direct access to specific parts of the information content when followed and assist the end-user in locating pieces of information of interest quickly. It is likely that end-users will expect video applications provided on the web to offer similar kinds of interactivity.

World Wide Web content is represented in the form of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) [6]. Many documents are statically represented as HTML documents produced by an HTML authoring tool or converted from other document formats. Web content is, however, increasingly being stored in databases where an N-tier web server retrieves the data from the database and generates the corresponding HTML as a response to end-user requests. Templates for these documents can be created as Java Server Pages [7] on web servers supporting Java 2 or as Active Server Pages [8] on Microsoft servers. This simplifies the task of updating information; the author can focus the attention on the content only and does not have to be concerned about layout issues.

2.3 Personalizing and Sharing Information and Experiences

The diversity in content and user interest makes personalization and localization important on the web. Many sites deal with user profiles - created by the end-users or captured automatically by observing user actions - and present a selected set of content based on the user profile and/or on the end-users' physical location. The web and the Internet are also becoming vehicles for end-users to share experiences through hosted web sites, instant messaging, and technologies that help end-users create content as well as consume it. Video and multimedia will likely play an important role in enabling shared experiences [2].

2.4 Mobility and Ubiquity

Professor Kleinrock observes that people are getting increasingly nomadic [9]. Cellular phones, PDAs, and other communication gadgets offer ubiquitous connectivity. This means, on one side, that the World Wide Web can be accessed from almost anywhere by a multitude of different devices. Even more, as Professor Kleinrock noted, this also means that an end-user may initiate a task at one location but would like to be able to continue working on the task as the location is changing.




Handbook of Video Databases. Design and Applications
Handbook of Video Databases: Design and Applications (Internet and Communications)
ISBN: 084937006X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 393

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