International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4Issue4- April 2013
Semantically Enhanced Content Management in
Media Cloud
Saravanan. K#1 and Jayalakshmi. N*2
#
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Regional Centre, Anna University Tirunelveli, India
*
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Regional Centre, Anna University Tirunelveli, India
Abstract—Cloud computing is becoming a key element in service
provision, allowing access to resources across internet
transparently without the hassle of investing hardware resources
nor maintaining or managing them. At present, sharing of media
files with friends and families get admired worldwide. UPNA or
DLNA are protocols designed to share content between devices
within home network. It lacks the mechanism to share content
outside the home domain and it doesn’t support advanced search
capabilities. To alleviate the above problem, we propose Media
Cloud, a middleware instantiated in set-top boxes to manage
media transparently allowing uniform access to multimedia
content belonging to different home. In addition, semantic
annotations are added to the multimedia resources and ontologybased searches enabled to enhance the searching facilities.
Keyword— UPnP, DLNA, Multimedia content, Semantic
annotations, Ontology.
INTRODUCTION
The term “Cloud Computing” has become ubiquitous in the
IT world. It is a platform for accessing and utilizing resources
via the web. In recent years, the growth of multimedia
applications such as video, audio, image has increased
significantly. Such multimedia resources are increasingly
viewed and shared through web 2.0 based applications such as
Flickr and You Tube [2]. The current state-of the-art devices
can share their content only by uploading it on external
applications. There is no infrastructure to manage media
resources in the home environments or outside of it. So, the
need for better media management in the home environment
increases.
In home environments, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
which is an extension of plug and play promoted by UPnP
forum or Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) are
protocols that let the users share the multimedia content
within heterogeneous devices in the home network. However,
these protocols have certain limitations of preventing the users
to share or access the multimedia content outside their home
domain. It also doesn’t provide support for searching across
multiple repositories in parallel and searching is done only by
directory hierarchy browsing.
To alleviate the above problem, we propose Media Cloud, a
middleware instantiated in home gateways that enable users to
share media transparently outside of their local domain.
Metadata plays an important role in the retrieval of
multimedia resources. The available metadata are often
I.
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general metadata stored in MPEG-7 or similar formats which
makes it difficult to find.
To overcome this searching difficulty, a new architecture of
ontology cloud has been constructed, which contains the
library of ontologies, providing Ontology as a Service (OaaS)
to the media cloud. It replaces the index search by an
ontology-based search [3] that facilitates retrieving of content
in an efficient and semantically meaningful manner.
Personalization of content is done at each user level by
applying role-based authorization mechanism [2] for granting
or denying access to the multimedia resources. Thus, with the
advent of media cloud, users can enjoy sharing of media
content in different homes with greater flexibility.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2
briefly overview of the related happening in the media cloud.
In Section 3, comprehensive details related to the architecture
of the media cloud are presented. Section 4 describes the
interaction of devices inside the home network. Section 5
depicts the ontology as a service (OaaS) provided by the
ontology cloud and section 6 shows the features of the Foreign
Content Aggregator that assists in the communication of
foreign devices. Section 7 describes the implementation
details and Section 8 gives the result analysis. Section 9
summarizes with a brief conclusive remarks and discussion on
future works.
II. RELATED WORK
Media cloud assists in the processing of multimedia content
and render it to users across the community cloud [5]. With
the increasing amount of multimedia, a semantic approach for
the processing of the content is required. Ontologies provide
semantic multimedia services for the multimedia computing
[6]. However, there is a need to manage massive amounts of
diverse user-created data. An architectural framework for a
cloud multimedia platform is proposed, where storing and
processing of massive amount of media content in social
networking web applications such as Face book and Flickr is
achieved [8]. Slawomir and et.al [14] proposed an
authentication framework using a zero-knowledge-proof
(ZKP) technique where personalized content can be shared in
a trusted environment.
Semantic similarity between words is identified by using
novel pattern extraction algorithm and a pattern clustering
algorithm [9]. It improved accuracy in community mining
task, but a time consuming process. Qun Ren and et.al, [16]
proposed semantic caching, in that both the semantic
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descriptions and the results of the previous queries are
maintained in the cache. It reduced the network traffic but
there is a lack of cache coherency control and it does not
process more complicated queries. Semantic-based web
service discovery used Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) [12]
for matching the service request with the service description
by the expansion of additional terms (retrieved from
ontology).
Compared to the existing models, proposed model of Media
cloud contains the following features: 1. Allows multiple
users across different home network to share/access content,
2. More personalized view of the content at each user level ,3.
Better content adaption and 4. Enhanced searching
capabilities.
III. MEDIA CLOUD A RCHITECTURE
Media Cloud is a middleware that enables classification,
searching and sharing of media across the home domain and
the cloud. It is sited in between the home network and the
Internet to communicate with the devices located in differed
home networks that belong to the cloud and to share those
contents as if they are in the same home domain. Media Cloud
is composed of Home Domain Manager, Content Indexer,
Foreign Content Aggregator, Home Media Indexes, IMS
Enabler, Access policy server and Ontology Server. Many
home networks join the Media Cloud to share and access
media files that is being shared by constituent members of the
cloud.
Fig. 1 Media Cloud Architecture. The figure shows the different home
networks which are constituent members of media cloud share and access
media content
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Each home network consists of a set of distributed
components (UPnP-enabled functions in UPnP based
environments and those that are deployed in home gateway).
The UPnP enabled components include UPnP media server,
UPnP media renderers and UPnP control point. These
components are usually found in UPnP based environments.
1) UPnP media server provides information and streams
media data to the users on the network. It is a computer
system that stores digital media and shares this content with
other devices. Media server provide a service to the control
points for browsing the media content of the server and
deliver the content to the user.
2) UPnP media renderer play back the media content
provided by the server. Media renderer is controlled by the
control point.
3) UPnP control point is an instance that interconnects
media server with media renderers. When a device is added to
the network, it advertises its service to the control point. The
control point retrieves the device description to study the
device capabilities and to interact with the devices. The
control point send actions to the device service by suitable
control messages to the control URL of the service. It let the
users to browse the contents of the media server and deliver
the content to the media renderer.
The home gateway is a network device that connects a
home network to a larger network. The components of home
gateway include policy agent, IMS user agent and presence
agent, UPnP remote extension, metadata server and tag server.
1) The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) provides
multimedia services. The user agent establishes a remote
session between different homes. The presence agent updates
the home presence status using the functions provided by the
centralized IMS enabler.
2) Policy Agent allows administrators i.e. privileged users
to configure policies. The configured policies are then added
to the realm. The policy agent relies on Policy Enforcement
Point (PEP) which sends decision request to Policy Decision
Point (PDP), obtains the policy decisions and let users know
whether they are authorized to access the requested resource.
It generates a session token identifier which is validated to
determine if the user has given permission to access the device
contents.
3) UPnP remote session enables sharing of contents
between UPnP terminals connected to remote network i.e. it
allows seamless connection between different home networks
thus enabling UPnP devices or control point in a home
network discover and interact with UPnP device in another
home network. Thus authorized remote users will experience
the remote devices behaving as if they belonged to the same
LAN.
4) The metadata server is a centralized repository for
storing and managing metadata created by the local users. It
uses Semantic Open Grid Service Architecture (S-OGSA) for
metadata management and enables ontology based searches
over the metadata available.
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5) The tag server is a component which is used to store
user-defined tags related to multimedia resources. Tag is a
unique identifier which is a type of Uniform Resource
Identifier.
The Foreign Content Aggregator makes the home network
a part of cloud. It uses katta [1] which is a distributed
application, provides service for managing high loads, very
large datasets and indices of different types. It helps searching
across multiple repositories.
The main goal of Content Indexer is to manage
communication of devices within a home network. It
discovers devices, extracts metadata from media files, creates
search index and adapts incoming and outgoing streams.
Creation of search index is the most important task of Content
Indexer. The index created with this information is stored in
Home Media Index (HMI) databases.
The Home Domain Manager (HDM) manages
communications with different devices and protocols. It uses
plug-in system to support new features and adds specific
abilities to support the different device capabilities.
The centralized components deployed by the Media Cloud
include IMS Enabler, Access Policy server and Ontology
server.
1) IMS Enabler provides IP multimedia services. It is
composed of Core IMS and presence server. The presence
server is used to manage service and user-related presence
information (e.g. availability, status etc...). It holds valuable
context information and builds the basis for stream transfer
between devices. The core IMS is the control component that
implements IMS call session control functions (CSCFs). It
performs the roles of core control, session control and media
resource control functions for users.
2) Access Policy Server is the security component of the
Media Cloud that provides authorization services and
facilitates tracking and control of media files. The access
policy server acts as Policy Decision Point (PDP) which
accepts access control requests, validates against the policy
defined held in policy repository, makes decisions and returns
the access control responses.
3) Ontology server is a kind of information system that
serves as a link in enabling diverse users and applications to
discover ontologies. It enables ontology based searches on the
already created indices that are stored in HMI database thus
provides advanced searching facilities.
Ontology Cloud contains ontologies developed and
provides relationships between entities in different ontologies.
It also provides ontology as a service (OaaS) to the requesting
cloud and enables semantically enhanced searching
capabilities.
IV. CONTENT INDEXING
The Content Indexer manages interaction of devices inside
the home network. The most important task of Content
Indexer is to create search index for contents using collection
of information like metadata, media file type, creation data
and Internet related information. Content Indexer has a
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functional module Content Skeleton. It uses Lucene, an open
source information retrieval software library and a high
performance indexer that enables searching over the index
using ranked or fielded searches. Lucene is very much suitable
for application requiring indexing and searching capabilities.
Lucene supports different type of queries like Boolean,
proximity, phrase, wildcard, term boosting or range queries.
Fig. 2 Content Indexing. The figure shows the structure of an index entry
(document) and the offerings of the different modules. Index created is stored
in HMI database
A. Content Skeleton
Every media file is analyzed and the Content Indexer
creates document for each file. A document is a collection of
field-value pairs. The document created is added into the
index. The Index Writer writes the document into the index
and adds new entries into it. Lucene index is a directory.
Every index entry corresponds to a document inside the
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directory. The fields differ by number and nature depending
on the media file.
The fields for every media file can be classified in three
categories.
1) The Content description category contains metadata,
social network feeds and internet related information. Fields
of this category are indexed and stored in the document to
make it possible to search across them.
2) The Access information category contains protocol
details, hardware information, network address and ports for
communicating with the device within the home network.
These fields are accessed by the Home Domain Manager to
extract information from the device. These fields are not
indexed but stored in the document.
3) The Security category contains access control
information and license information (in case of commercial
content). These fields are accessed by the security system to
limit the usage of the content, for instance, which can access
it, if it is shared in the cloud.
The index created is stored in Home Media Index (HMI)
database.
Fig. 3 Ontology as a Service Architecture. The figure sketches out the
composition of ontology cloud which provides Ontology as a Service (OaaS)
to the media cloud
Ontology cloud shown in Fig. 3 provides services to
diverse users. The ontology obtained by the server is parsed
by Jena OWL parser which produces semantic results for the
query made by the user. Thus Media Cloud enables
semantically enabled searches on the Home Media Indexes
where already created indices are stored and enhances the
searching capabilities.
VI. FOREIGN CONTENT AGGREGATOR
Foreign Content Aggregator enables communication of
foreign devices transparently. It makes home network a part of
cloud i.e. the content stored in the device are made available
in the cloud. It uses katta, a scalable, failure tolerant,
distributed, data storage for real time access running on many
commodity hardware similar to Hadoop and MapReduce.
Foreign Content Aggregator is composed of two functional
modules namely Content Server and Content Delivery
Module.
V. ONTOLOGY A S A SERVICE
The query made by the user is passed to the ontology server
which translates the search string into ontology based query.
With this query ontology based searches are performed on the
ontology cloud which is the storage repository for the
ontologies developed. Ontology editor assists in the creation
and manipulation of ontologies and express it in any of the
ontology languages. Protégé is an ontology editor used in
Media Cloud. Protégé ontologies are expressed in a variety of
formats like RDF(s), OWL and XML schema.
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Fig. 4 Foreign Content Aggregator. The figure shows two functional modules
content server and content delivery module. The content stream is delivered
through the FCA to the foreign devices
The Content Server Module enables users outside the
domain to search content within the HMI database. The
Content Delivery Module delivers the content to the
requesting node outside the home domain.
A. Content Server
Users share all type of user generated and professional
content through web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and You Tube,
where the content has to be uploaded, annotated, commented
on and downloaded. It is therefore necessary to let users share
their own content to trusted individuals without having to
upload it on external sites.
Foreign Content Aggregator uses Katta, a distributed
application. Each node hosts a so called Content Server.
Nodes serve index “shards”. Nodes are the participants of
Media Cloud. An index for Katta is a folder with a set of
subfolders. These subfolders are called index shards. The kind
of index shards can be different. The Content Server
determines which index shard is supported.
The user searches the Content within an index by
connecting to all nodes and merging results from all nodes
into a unified result list. Thus Foreign Content Aggregator
allows parallel search in several repositories as if they are in
the same domain.
The Master node manages all nodes and index shard
assignment. The zookeeper, a locking system is used for
Master Node communication. Zookeeper manages
information about node failure, configuring information,
number of nodes that are live and also provides group
services. It updates this information to all the members of the
Media Cloud.
The user communicates with the nodes on a search request.
Katta supports distributed scoring. It gets the document
frequency for the query made and the value is passed to all
nodes. In this way, it attains the goal of finding the contents
that better match the search.
Media cloud has been developed using cloudsim, which is
an extensible simulation toolkit for modelling and simulating
both single as well as inter-networked clouds. The
development phase comprises of the creation of the various
components of media cloud including the cloud environment.
The Home Media Index database was developed using the
Apache Lucene, a high performance indexer.
Fig. 5 Home Network Environment. This figure sketches out the indices
created by the members of the media cloud stored in HMI databases
Security in media cloud is maintained using access server
policy. Unlike other approaches, authentication in media
cloud is handled at each user level, associated with their roles
and we applied role-based authentication mechanism. Only if
the authentication is successful the users were allowed to
access the multimedia content. The authorized user can view
the indices created and stored in the HMI databases by the
other media cloud instances through the Home Network
environment showed in Fig. 5.
B. Content Delivery Module
The Content Delivery Module sends the content to other
Media Cloud instances located outside the home domain. This
module transmits content by streaming or by any other
protocol.
The source device which contains the content requested by
the other node streams the content to the Home Domain
Manager. The CDM selects appropriate protocol to send the
content across the Internet. The destination node receives the
content and streams it to the Home Domain Manager. The
HDM at the destination uses plug-in system, and adds new
plug-ins to support the device capability and the protocol
used. Media Cloud supports communication of different
devices in different homes transparently by performing
content adaption.
VII.
IMPLEMENTATION
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Fig. 6 Cloudlet Environment. This figure shows whether the requested
resource fits to the policy defined
The cloudlet environment showed in Fig.6 was developed
to make user know whether the requested services fit on the
authorization policy and they are either granted or denied with
the resource.
Fig. 8 Content Delivery Module. Delivers the content to the foreign devices
adapting to the device capability
The Foreign Content Aggregator showed in Fig. 8 separates
the content based on the protocol used. If the source and the
destination device use the same protocol and have the same
device capability then the content is automatically streamed
into the media renderer and the content is delivered.
Otherwise the Home Domain Manager in the destination
system uses plug in system to adapt to the device capability
and deliver the content.
VIII.
Fig. 7 Content Management Environment. Registers the accessed files
We developed the content management environment as
showed in Fig. 7 to register all the files that are accessed by
the privileged users. The users depending upon their role and
access privilege can add, delete or modify contents in the
media cloud.
RESULT ANALYSIS
A. Results Based on Indexing
Media cloud acts as a proxy for delivering content across
the home domain and the cloud and it offers search services.
Searching operation over the index uses resources already
allocated. This search operation over the media cloud might
be recurrent. There may be large number of members of the
cloud so media cloud STB might obtain multiple simultaneous
search requests. Fig. 9 shows the results of the total number of
content during each access and Fig. 10 provide the number of
content indexed during each search operation.
Total Content
No. of records
52
50
48
Total Content
46
44
0
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5
10
No. of Access
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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4Issue4- April 2013
Total Content Vs Indexed Content
No. of Records
100
Same Protocol Vs Different Protocols
No. of Records
Fig. 9 Total number of content during each access
60
Total Content
50
40
30
50
0
1
2
3
4
Total Content
20
Indexed Content
10
Total Content
5
6
Content
delivered with
same protocol
0
7
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 No. of Access
No. of Access
Fig. 13 Comparison between contents delivered with same protocol and
contents delivered with different protocol among the total contents
Fig. 10 Total content versus number of content indexed
B. Results Based on Protocols Used for Content Delivery
While handling communication with devices outside the
home network, the foreign content aggregator separates the
content based on the protocol used.
Total Content Vs Same Protocol
No. of Records
60
Total Content
40
Content
delivered with
same protocol
20
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
No. of Access
Fig.11 Comparison between total content and contents delivered with same
protocol
Total Content Vs Different Protocol
No. of Records
60
Total Content
Fig. 11 shows the results of the number of contents that are
delivered using the same protocol as that of the source device.
Fig. 12 provides the results of the number of contents that are
delivered using different protocols and Fig. 13 shows the
comparison between the contents delivered with same
protocol and different protocols.
CONCLUSION AND F UTURE WORK
Media Cloud achieves transparency and provides a
secured, economically effective and manageable solution for
bringing cloud computing paradigm to content management
among federated home networks. It supports different devices
by performing content adaption and enhances cooperation
among different home networks facilitating an easy to manage
solution.
Unlike other approaches Media Cloud handles
authorization at a granularity of homes. It relies on role-based
authorization mechanisms at each user level, associated with
roles for granting or denying access to resources through the
access policy server. Thus it mitigates the privacy problem
and provides a personalized view of the content. Ontologybased searches enhance the searching process and provide
more relevant search result. However, media cloud does not
allow service requests that are formed using specialized query
languages. Techniques that facilitate complex queries must be
developed.
IX.
40
REFERENCES
20
0
1
2
3 4 5 6
No. of Access
7
Content
delivered with
different
protocol
Fig. 12 Comparison between total content and contents delivered with
different protocols
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