Metadata management for quality-driven delivery

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The recent advances in distributed systems and wireless technology, as well as the development of sophisticated applications, now allow users to access any information, from anywhere with any device. In the context of such complex environments, and more specifically for continuous media delivery, Quality of Service (QoS) management has been introduced to support service provision with quality requirements, traditionally focusing on varying communication conditions. If we consider the notion of QoS from a broader perspective, we have to position the user at the center of the process and allow him to express non-functional requirements specified according to high-level quality dimensions that are later mapped onto low-level dimensions. For that purpose, we propose a quality-driven delivery (QDD) approach, aiming at providing user oriented QoS management through the integration of different mechanisms, such as quality information management, system components interoperability, distributed execution of QDD activities or multi-criteria optimization.   In the framework of our research program, we will focus on quality information management to support QDD for distributed multimedia applications. Quality information can be any type of metadata describing the computing or communication resources, the data to be delivered, the technical infrastructure or the user characteristics. Such information is essential to support QDD activities and decisions, and mechanisms should be provided to store, access, share, transfer, integrate or exchange quality information. We will investigate model management and model engineering approaches to propose, design and implement such mechanisms. Model management and model engineering have recently attracted a lot of interest in database, software engineering and semantic web research communities. We believe that they are particularly adapted for the design and development of flexible and extensible metadata management strategies. We plan to validate our approach with specific applications in the fields of media arts, health-care and video delivery.