The transfer of streaming data is not well supported by current web services standards. To include multimedia streaming support in the web services domain, this paper presents a novel multimedia streaming web services framework for the transfer of streaming multimedia content. First, the framework includes an implementation of a query service for publishing a description of the multimedia content that is input to or output from a multimedia web service. This query service is specified in an extension of WSDL. Using MPEG-7 metadata, content descriptions can be queried before the invocation of a multimedia web service. Second, two new MEPs and their SOAP HTTP bindings are created for the exchange of streaming data between two SOAP endpoints. The implementations of these new MEPs use the MIME multipart/related structure and MTOM packaging when transferring the multimedia packets as SOAP messages. To reduce the transfer overhead introduced by the packaging method, this paper investigated extensively the application of various compression schemes for the SOAP messages as well as for the packaging of the binary packet data. Experiments show that the proposed framework can achieve a performance comparable to a simple HTTP multimedia streaming method.

Web services provide efficient development and deployment of interoperable and reusable applications. Multimedia Web services is an implementation of multimedia applications within the Web services framework. However, current Web services standards are not sufficient to cater for multimedia streaming, the commonly used delivery method for large multimedia objects. In this paper, a SOAP-based streaming content delivery framework for multimedia Web services is proposed. The framework uses an extension of existing SOAP standards which allows streaming content to be transmitted between two SOAP nodes over the HTTP protocol. The extension includes a new SOAP streaming message exchange pattern and its corresponding SOAP HTTP binding. The proposed framework is capable of delivering quality adaptive multimedia content to users with heterogeneous configurations and requirements. By incorporating a proxy server between the service provider and requester the efficiency of the content delivery can be improved using multimedia caching.

The use of streaming multimedia has become more and more common as the content of e-learning material. The distribution of the material is typically achieved by a dedicated streaming server. There are several proprietary technologies that can act as the streaming server but there is a lack of standardized approach for this purpose. Recently importance has been placed on the interoperability and reusability of learning material by making use of standards such as SCORM and web services. In this paper we propose a service oriented architecture for the delivery of multimedia content which is interoperable and reusable. We model this delivery by extending current web service standards, and we briefly discuss the use of such web service resources in SCORM.

Typically, feedback from analysis of three-dimensional volume image structures are presented in the visual domain. This ignores the potential for complementary analysis of feedback in the aural domain. This paper presents a system in which visualization of a volume image may be enhanced through representation of the voxel structure by a sound sequence (termed a 'sonification') in which a sequence of sound signals is generated by the mapping of voxel values to pitch, amplitude, timing and other acoustic parameters according to the design of the selected sound instrument(s). Stereo audio or spatial audio processing techniques are employed to enhance the perception of the representative sonification as emanating from the visual loci of the associated voxel.