Telecommunication and internet services are constantly subject to change, seeking the customer's full satisfaction. Enriching these services with innovative approaches such as context-aware, social, mobile, adaptable and interactive mechanisms, enables users to experience a variety of personalized services seamlessly across different platforms and technologies. In this sense, advertising is no exception, especially if we consider that it will become the business enabler for next generation services. Nevertheless, currently there is no cross-domain solution capable of delivering real-time advertising across heterogeneous environments or domains, and at the same time, address user needs, desires and intentions. This is because most of the products available today are only used within isolated environments/silos. Therefore, managing advertising campaigns across different verticals is still very complex. However, leveraging on the advances provided by Next Generation Networks, together with the design principles inherent to Service Oriented Architectures and capabilities offered by Service Delivery Platforms, this scenario is about to change. Based on key conceptual entities called enablers, this work aims to change the current scenario. More concretely, this book introduces three distinct but complementary enablers. The Human Enabler provides a real-time context brokerage system capable of securely managing different types of user-related data in a standardized way. The Reasoning Enabler is the result of a well-defined methodology that enables new knowledge to be reasoned, based on previously stored data, by aggregating, correlating and inferring new information about people and their contexts. Lastly, the Session Management Enabler is responsible for abstracting the communication layers. It provides a context-aware multimedia delivery system capable of personalizing and adapting multimedia content according to a set of user and system pre-defined context data or rules, respectively. Altogether, they form the Converged User-Centric Advertising System and introduce new features that address the needs of both users and advertisers.
Inspec keywords: real-time systems; ubiquitous computing; multimedia communication; next generation networks
Other keywords: human enabler; multimedia content adaptation; user-centric advertisement; reasoning enabler; context-aware multimedia delivery system; information aggregation; next generation networks; information correlation; data storage; system predefined context data; communication layers; key enablers; session management enabler; user-related data; real-time context brokerage system; converged user-centric advertising system
Subjects: General and management topics; Multimedia communications; Computer networks and techniques; Computer communications; Multimedia; General electrical engineering topics
This introduction explains the main motivation for the work, highlighting the role of advertising in next generation services. Then, it introduces the main problems to be addressed, and the adopted methodology to tackle them.
This chapter takes advertising as its main topic and covers its basic aspects, namely definition, types of advertising and its impact on society, politics, culture and the economy. Furthermore, it overviews related work at standardization, at industry and research levels.
This chapter presents the user requirements, which deal with the users' expectations and business partners' requirements. Covering the main issues that might influence the technology adoption and the functional requirements, which relate to the system functionalities and the nonfunctional requirements, and dealing with other important aspects for the proposed advertising framework.
This section defines the system architecture and functions for the CUCAF. By definition, it is a multi-advertising framework based on different communication technologies and context types. It, therefore, introduces generic communication and context abstraction layers, in order to provide a uniform platform, applicable to all different technologies. These abstractions are largely based on those that are specified by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), for example the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) or the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), and the ones defined by some context-aware research initiatives, respectively.
With the increasing amount of information available on the Internet, managing and filtering it in an efficient way has become a major issue. Although many efforts are seen in the content industry, the context part is often ignored or dealt with in very specific scopes. In this sense, by extending a previously known context brokerage framework, composed by a context broker, context providers and context consumers, this work provides a generic architecture for assuring privacy and security to any context-aware management system.
Based on data collected through a small set of 'snapshot' observations of a social network, the work done in this chapter tried to understand how users' interests correlate (i.e. groups of interests). Furthermore, considering a rich dataset of user preferences and interactions, by using clustering techniques, it identifies the most popular users within these groups. For this purpose, the strategy focused on multiple dimensions of user-related data, providing a more detailed process model of how influence spreads. Based on the work developed, advertisers, or any service provider willing to use this methodology and architecture, will be able to infer new types of knowledge, previously not available.
In this sense, this work proposes a multimedia delivery framework capable of addressing the aforementioned problems. Focusing on the application and session layers, it uses context-aware technologies to achieve a balance between personalization and efficiency. This is achieved on the basis of two fundamental principles. The first is called sub-grouping and consists of allowing a multimedia file to be separated into different media types (audio, video and text) and later stream it in the most appropriate combination of media types and versions (encodings). The second is supported by a generic context-aware framework, which enables the selection of the most appropriate encodings based on a series of current context conditions.
Providing evidence that this architectural model works, this section showed how different components were implemented, which technologies they used, and how the interfaces towards sub-modules or other components were realized. Furthermore, it highlighted some of the implementation details and decisions. Based on this, it identifies what was implemented from scratch, what was modified, improved or just re-used from other entities. The main reason for this relates to the implementation efforts required, which are not justifiable for a prototype. Alternative realizations of the CUCAF have been presented, the implementation only accounts the full-featured advertising solution, where all the previously described components are combined together to achieve the desired CUCAS.
After overviewing the problems, the requirements, the design, the specifications and respective prototype implementation, it is important to evaluate the impact of this work in the context of advertising and related industries. In this sense, this chapter presents the evaluation and respective validation mechanisms, as well as a discussion regarding this work's contribution in comparison to other approaches.
With the purpose of improving user-perceived QoE for next generation advertising, it was important to understand the state of the art and what the trends for both telecommunications and Internet worlds were (Simoes & Wahle, 2010). This study revealed that most works were adopting a user-centric strategy combined with some sort of multimedia technology. Using these factors as common determiner, within initial work efforts, simple architectures for personalized, group and community multimedia delivery (Al-Hezmi et al., 2003; Simoes et al., 2009b, 2009c) were prototyped, respectively.
This section introduces material that supports the main book. It contains detailed information regarding specific topics.