Annotation Digital content has revolutionized the way broadcasters and Web sites deliver images, sound, video, and multimedia. This book provides the technical details of transcoding and annotation that engineers need to know to create accessible and reusable digital content capable of being tailored and personalized for a particular audience

We are delighted to present the ECDL 2004 Conference proceedings from the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital - braries at the University of Bath, Bath, UK. This followed an impressive and geographicallydispersedseriesof locationsfor previousevents: Pisa(1997),H- aklion(1998),Paris(1999),Lisbon (2000),Darmstadt(2001),Rome (2002),and Trondheim (2003). The conference re?ected the rapidly evolving landscape of digital libraries, both in technology developments and in the focus of approaches to implem- tation. An emphasis on the requirements of the individual user and of diverse and distributed user communities was apparent. In addition, the conference p- gramme began to address, possibly for the ?rst time, the associated themes of e-research/e-scienceand e-learning and their relationship to digital libraries. We observed increasing commonality in both the distributed information archit- tures and the technical standards that underpin global infrastructure devel- ments. Digital libraries are integral to this information landscape and to the creation of increasingly powerful tools and applications for resource discovery and knowledge extraction. Digital libraries support and facilitate the data and information ?ows within the scholarly knowledge cycle and provide essential - abling functionality for both learnersand researchers. The varied and innovative research activities presented at ECDL 2004 demonstrate the exciting potential of this very fast-moving ?eld. The 148 papers, 43 posters, 5 panels, 14 tutorials and 4 workshops subm- ted this year were once again of the highest quality.

This volume contains selected and revised papers from the Sixth Thematic Workshop of the EU Network of Excellence DELOS on Digital Library Architectures, which was held in S. Margherita di Pula (Cagliari), Italy, 24–25 June 2004.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 5th Paci?c Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM 2004) held in Tokyo Waterfront City, Japan, November 30–December 3, 2004. Following the success of the preceding conferences, PCM 2000 in Sydney, PCM 2001 in Beijing, PCM 2002 in Hsinchu, and PCM 2003 in Singapore, the ?fth PCM brought together the researchers, developers, practitioners, and educators in the ?eld of multimedia. Theoretical breakthroughs and practical systems were presented at this conference, thanks to the support of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, IEEE Region 10 and IEEE Japan Council, ACM SIGMM, IEICE and ITE. PCM2004featuredacomprehensiveprogramincludingkeynotetalks,regular paperpresentations,posters,demos,andspecialsessions.Wereceived385papers andthenumberofsubmissionswasthelargestamongrecentPCMs.Amongsuch a large number of submissions, we accepted only 94 oral presentations and 176 poster presentations. Seven special sessions were also organized by world-leading researchers. We kindly acknowledge the great support provided in the reviewing of submissions by the program committee members, as well as the additional reviewers who generously gave their time. The many useful comments provided by the reviewing process must have been very valuable for the authors’ work. Thisconferencewouldneverhavehappenedwithoutthehelpofmanypeople. We greatly appreciate the support of our strong organizing committee chairs and advisory chairs. Among the chairs, special thanks go to Dr. Ichiro Ide and Dr. Takeshi Naemura who smoothly handled publication of the proceedings with Springer. Dr. Kazuya Kodama did a fabulous job as our Web master.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of the 17th and 18th annual conferences of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI 2003 and JSAI 2004, and co-located international workshops, held in Niigata, Japan in June 2003 and in Kanazawa, Japan in May/June 2004 respectively. It features a number of award winning papers as well as revised full workshop papers from these conferences.

The technology of arti?cial intelligence is increasing its importance thanks to the rapid growth of the Internet and computer technology. In Japan, the annual conference series of JSAI (The Japanese Society for Arti?cial Intelligence) has been playing a leading role in promoting AI research, and selected papers of the annual conferences have been published in the LNAI series since 2003. This book consists of award papers from the 21st annual conference of JSAI (JSAI 2007) and selected papers from the four co-located workshops. Seven papers were awarded among more than 335 presentations in the conference and 24 papers were selected from a total of 48 presentations in the co-located workshops: Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 2007 (LENLS 2007), the International Workshop on Risk Informatics (RI 2007), the 5th Wo- shop on Learning with Logics and Logics for Learning (LLLL 2007), and the 1st International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2007). The award papers from JSAI 2007 underwent a rigorous selection process. Firstly, recommendations were made from three people (Session Chair, session commentator and one PC member) in each session, and then recommended - pers were carefully reviewed and voted for by PC members for ?nal selection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence, ICAT 2006, held in Hangzhou, China in November/December 2006. The 138 revised papers cover anthropomorphic intelligent robotics, artificial life, augmented reality, distributed and collaborative VR system, motion tracking, real time computer simulation virtual reality, as well as VR interaction and navigation techniques.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the nine workshops that were organized in conjunction with the Business Information Systems Conference, BIS 2009, taking place in Poznan, Poland, on April 27-29, 2009. The 34 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. In addition, the volume contains the BIS 2009 keynote speech and two invited speeches presented at the workshops LIT and ECONOM/Enterprise X.0. The topics covered are DeepWeb (ADW), applications and economics of knowledge-based technologies (AKTB, ECONOM), service-oriented architectures (SDS-SOA), legal IT (LIT), social Web and Web 2.0 (SAW, Enterprise X.0), e-learning (EeLT), and enterprise systems in higher education (ESHE).

Cloud Computing and Digital Media: Fundamentals, Techniques, and Applications presents the fundamentals of cloud and media infrastructure, novel technologies that integrate digital media with cloud computing, and real-world applications that exemplify the potential of cloud computing for next-generation digital media. It brings together technologies for media/data communication, elastic media/data storage, security, authentication, cross-network media/data fusion, interdevice media interaction/reaction, data centers, PaaS, SaaS, and more. The book covers resource optimization for multimedia cloud computing—a key technical challenge in adopting cloud computing for various digital media applications. It describes several important new technologies in cloud computing and digital media, including query processing, semantic classification, music retrieval, mobile multimedia, and video transcoding. The book also illustrates the profound impact of emerging health-care and educational applications of cloud computing. Covering an array of state-of-the-art research topics, this book will help you understand the techniques and applications of cloud computing, the interaction/reaction of mobile devices, and digital media/data processing and communication.