Semantic hyper/multimedia adaptation: schemes and applications

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more users are witnessing the impact of Hypermedia/ Multimedia as well as the penetration of social applications in their life. Internet was designed in order maximize user choice and innovation, while Web, as the ultimate service over thismulti-layered structure, created a global software environment for millions of users worldwide. Both technological attainments are continuously revolutionizing the way we process, use, exchange and disseminate information. Through this revolution, many real-life applications in the fields of communication, commerce, education, government, and entertainment are redefined. Parallel to the evolution of Internet and Web, several Hypermedia/Multimedia schemes and technologies bring semantic-based intelligent, personalized and adaptive services to the end users. More and more techniques are applied in media systems in order to be user/group-centric, adapting to different content and context features of a single or a community user. In respect to all the above, researchers need to explore and study the plethora of challenges that emergent personalisation and adaptation technologies bring to the new era. This edited volume aims to increase the awareness of researchers in this area. It includes thirteen (13) articles authored by researchers from eight (8) different European countries, namely Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, and UK. All accepted contributions provide an in-depth investigation on research and deployment issues, regarding already introduced schemes and applications in Semantic Hyper/Multimedia and Social Media Adaptation. Moreover, the authors provide survey-based articles, so as potential readers can use it for catching up the recent trends and applications in respect to the relevant literature. Finally, the authors discuss and present their approach in the respective field or problem addressed. For consistency purposes and in order to further highlight the authors’ contributions, we divided this edited volume to four (4) separate chapters, which cover most of the topics announced in our open call for papers. The chapter titles are: – Chapter 1: Semantics Acquisition and Usage, – Chapter 2: Reasoning for Personalization and Recommendation, – Chapter 3: Social and Context-aware Adaptation, and – Chapter 4: Multimedia and Open Standards The reader can also find analytical prefaces of each chapter, which summarise the aims of each article, and how the work described is related with the chapter topic. From our part, as Guest-Editors, we would like to thank all authors for their submitted contributions and the opportunity they gave us to edit this volume. We hope that all the contributions that appear in this edited volume will contribute towards a deeper understanding of the key problems in this area, and that they will help researchers and developers to find new solutions to existing problems, opening in parallel new research paths in related topics. We also would like to explicitly acknowledge the help of all referees involved during the review phases. Their valuable comments and suggestions improved the quality of the published works. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to Prof. Dr. Janusz Kacprzyk, and Dr. Thomas Ditzinger, Editor and Senior Editor of Springer SCI book series respectively, for the all the support and guidance provided to us, as well as, the fruitful cooperation we had