Abstract
As the social character of the Web grows stronger, online multimedia resources become more tangled, exhibiting multiple and complex relationships. Often, these relationships are not easily spotted by search engines because they are not explicit. Still, when searching for content, users would certainly appreciate to receive results indicating all resources that are somehow related to their topic of interest without having to explicitly request for it. In spite of this trend, current technology for declaring and describing resources on the Internet as well as their inter-relationships is very much fragmented and the most commonly used standards, such as HTML, do not offer adequate functionality. While the goal of the MPEG-21 standard is to provide an all encompassing, universal and standard way to perform the declaration of digital resources, the work being developed in the IST CONVERGENCE project has shown that this standard, (specifically its part 3, Digital Item Identification), also has a limited ability to specify relationships between digital resources. This document presents a proposed extension to MPEG-21 Digital Item Identification, which enables it to support a uniform, semantically expressive and precise specification of the relationships between MPEG-21 digital items, rendering it a much more effective tool for a ubiquitous representation and interconnection of digital resources. © 2011 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract
Universities are continually pursuing ways to adapt their educational practices, looking to develop new learning culture that encourages creativity and active engagement. The adoption of augmented lecture podcast scenarios, based on a content-centric paradigm, looks a promising way to reach a new level of interactivity. This paper analyzes the main advantages provided by this innovative approach comparing it with the traditional podcasting developing model. Additionally, it proposes possible business models based on content distribution and augmentation, to enable wider exploitation of the approach within university environments. © 2012 Infonomics Society.

Abstract
The production, distribution, and consumption of information goods have endured numerous challenges over the years. Most recently, the Internet and digital consumer technologies have severely disrupted established intellectual-property regimes, enabling the near costless reproduction and distribution of information commodities. In addition, sophisticated tools have enabled new collaborative spaces (such as blogs, social websites, and so forth) formedia production and distribution, posing new challenges to traditional creator-producer-consumer paradigms. This article analyzes the present situation's main technological characteristics, its economic implications, and the industry's response-and outlines a possible solution to the problems.

Abstract
The amount of on-line information content is growing without apparent limits. The lack of a coherent and consistent structure for its expression leads to increasing problems in terms of desired information retrieval and rendering. Multiple initiatives have been undertaken to bring forth such a global coherence. Nonetheless, it is still unattained. The informational landscape is highly fragmented in terms of the formats of the information object (IO) and their semantic interconnection, which is still incipient. This work exploits a loose and common sense based analogy between the Internet and the brain for the development of a new and versatile, MPEG 21 based data structuring format (termed Cognitive Object Format), for the description of information objects, equating them to cerebral memories. The objective is to enable an easier and more pervasive human (machine aided) or automatic interpretation and access to IO and their meanings in order to contribute to the development of a coherent base for their declaration and structuring.