Heterogeneous multimedia environments make difficult the automatic deployment and interoperability of networked multimedia systems. Diversity of languages, protocols, and hardware platforms lead to major incompatibility issues. Moreover, dynamic multimedia systems instantiation and configuration guided by user and community requirements and preferences are not easy to be performed in this context. This work introduces an ontology framework for automatic networked multimedia systems deployment and configuration driven by the requirements and preferences of the users. A case study illustrating how networked multimedia systems can be dynamically deployed is presented in order to demonstrate the advantages of using this framework.

Today, the development of virtual reality (VR) applications for upper limb motor rehabilitation is still a difficult and time-consuming task. It requires developers to be skilled in motor rehabilitation, interaction devices, and stroke survivor characteristics, among others, to be able to develop a virtual environment (VE). In the literature there are several recommendations to aid in the design of VEs. However, to integrate the recommendations it is necessary to understand key domain concepts in motor rehabilitation. In this paper, we introduce VEULMoR, an ontology-based approach for designing VEs for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation. This approach uses the domain expertise coded into the ontology to shorten and facilitate the design of a VE. The information contained in the ontology can be used to denote the design factors that integrate the VE.

Quality of Service (QoS) management in home networks becomes a complex function when dealing with dynamic evolution of user requirements and network services. Autonomous management of QoS asks for decision models able to incorporate this evolving nature of requirements and services. In this paper, we propose an extensible framework that integrates a semantic space for user requirements and preferences aimed at guiding an autonomous QoS decision model. The use of this framework is illustrated in the context of QoS management in home networks.

SummaryObjectives: 1) To enhance the content of an ontology for designing virtual environments (VEs) for upper limb motor rehabilitation of stroke patients according to the suggestions and comments of rehabilitation specialists and software developers, 2) to characterize the perceived importance level of the ontology, 3) to determine the perceived usefulness of the ontology, and 4) to identify the safety characteristics of the ontology for VEs design according to the rehabilitation specialists.Methods: Using two semi-structured Web questionnaires, we asked six rehabilitation specialists and six software developers to provide us with their perception regarding the level of importance and the usability of the ontology. From their responses we have identified themes related to perceived and required safety characteristics of the ontology.Results: Significant differences in the importance level were obtained for the Stroke Disability, VE Configuration, Outcome Measures, and Safety Calibration classes, which were perceived as highly important by rehabilitation specialists. Regarding usability, the ontology was perceived by both groups with high usefulness, ease of use, learnability and intention of use. Concerning the thematic analysis of recommendations, eight topics for safety characteristics of the ontology were identified: adjustment of therapy strategies; selection and delimitation of movements; selection and proper calibration of the interaction device; proper selection of measuring instruments; gradual modification of the difficulty of the exercise; adaptability and variability of therapy exercises; feedback according to the capabilities of the patient; and real-time support for exercise training.Conclusions: The rehabilitation specialists and software developers confirmed the importance of the information contained in the ontology regarding motor rehabilitation of the upper limb. Their recommendations highlight the safety features and the advantages of the ontology as a guide for the effective design of VEs.

Heterogeneous networks, including personal, home and collaborative enterprise networks are aimed at interconnecting diverse communities of users. In the case of large communities of mobile, distributed and collaborating users sharing their multimedia content, scalable and semantic approaches are needed to facilitate the efficient publication and discovery of data. In this work, we propose an approach aimed at efficiently providing the required functionalities for dynamically managing the resources and the multimedia content of interconnected home networks, as well as providing the required community sharing capabilities. Our solution consists in combining the benefits of both ontologies and peer-to-peer approaches, by taking advantage of the semantic capabilities of ontologies at local domain level and the scalable P2P solutions at inter-domains level. Our proposed framework is founded on a new architecture based on peer-to-peer event-based communication system and using mainly a home box entity based on a global multimedia ontology. This domain ontology allows publishers and subscribers to use a common semantic space to characterise production and consumption of resources and services. Our approach can also be applied for similar large interconnected systems scenarios such as topic discovery with JNDI and service exchange with UDDI.