Title: A scalable service-oriented architecture for multimedia analysis, synthesis and consumption

Authors: Steffen Heinzl, Dominik Seiler, Ernst Juhnke, Thilo Stadelmann, Ralph Ewerth, Manfred Grauer, Bernd Freisleben

Addresses: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Hans-Meerwein-Str. 3, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Hans-Meerwein-Str. 3, D-35032 Marburg, Germany; Information Systems Institute, University of Siegen, Holderlinstr. 3, D-57068 Siegen, Germany. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Hans-Meerwein-Str. 3, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Hans-Meerwein-Str. 3, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Hans-Meerwein-Str. 3, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. ' Information Systems Institute, University of Siegen, Holderlinstr. 3, D-57068 Siegen, Germany. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Hans-Meerwein-Str. 3, D-35032 Marburg, Germany

Abstract: Although Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) were not designed for multimedia processing, they speed up the development of distributed multimedia applications by allowing the composition or reconfiguration of existing services. For example, the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is a powerful tool to orchestrate, model and execute workflows. However, due to its process-oriented approach, it is not directly applicable to data-intensive applications, such as those from the multimedia domain. In this paper, a comprehensive service-oriented infrastructure for multimedia applications is presented that (a) overcomes some drawbacks of BPEL for data-intensive applications and (b) provides tools that further ease the development and use of web services for a broad scope of multimedia applications covering video content analysis, audio analysis and synthesis and multimedia consumption. The proposed service-oriented infrastructure can be easily integrated into existing business processes by using BPEL. A dynamic allocation of cloud computing resources ensures the scalability of a multimedia application. To allow efficient and flexible data transfers in BPEL workflows, an implementation of the Flexible SOAP with Attachments (Flex-SwA) architecture is used that allows data transmission in conjunction with SOAP messages. The protocol requirements of services in the case of real-time, streaming or file transfer can be described by a communication policy. Three use cases of multimedia applications are evaluated.

Keywords: multimedia; service-oriented architecture; SOA; distributed analysis; mash-up; workflow; Business Process Execution Language; BPEL; Visual Grid Orchestrator; ViGO; video content analysis; audio resynthesis; web services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2009.028344

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2009 Vol.5 No.3, pp.219 - 260

Published online: 16 Sep 2009 *

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