Content Delivery Service for ABC

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reorganising the way its website content is delivered and have issued a Request for Tender for Provision of a Content Delivery Service. There is a detailed tender document outlining the requirements of the system.

There is provision for disaster recovery and reliability of the system, but there appears no mention for the need for the system to operate during natural disasters and other emergencies. The ABC provides emergency communications to the public in these situations and therefore its content delivery service needs to be of to a higher standard of reliability than that of a pure entertainment service.

There has been some controversy over advertising on ABC mobile web sites. There is no mention of mobile web sites in the tender document. This may indicate that the ABC thinks no special provision for mobile is required, or they are going to provide that content via separate commercial web sites with advertising.

Category 43000000 - Information Technology Broadcasting and Telecommunications ...

The ABC proposes to reorganise the way its website content is delivered to its audience and therefore is seeking to engage a Delivery Service provider such as a Content Distribution Network (CDN) or Similar Service to supply the required bandwidth, server capacity and performance. ...

From: Provision of a Content Delivery Service, ATM ID NS0761RFP, ABC, 8-Oct-2008

Using Semantics at Middleware, Web Services and Business Levels

Amit Sheth, from Wright State University (USA) will talk on "Using Semantics at Middleware, Web Services and Business Levels" at the CSIRO in the ANU CSIT Seminar Room, in Canberra, 11 August 2008:

CSIRO ICT

Using Semantics at Middleware, Web Services and Business Levels

Amit Sheth (Wright State University)

DATE: 2008-08-11
TIME: 15:00:00 - 16:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101

ABSTRACT:
Services are pervasive in today's economic landscape, and services-based architectures are rapidly being adopted for enterprises as well as for Web applications. The need for a broad perspective on services that takes in people and organizational descriptions in addition to technical interface descriptions has already been recognized as part of the overall vision of services science. To this mix, we add the middleware (including distributed and cloud computing) that improves the implementation and interoperability of service oriented architecture (SOA). In this context, we present the semantic services science (3S) modeling framework to support service descriptions that capture system/technical, human, organizational, and business value/requirements aspects. We believe that a combination of Web2.0 and semantic technology can be used to energize services across the broad service spectrum. We describe how the 3S approach could be used along four points in this spectrum: (1) semantic descriptions of standard Web services (with the help of SAWSDL and semantic policy descriptions); (2) semantic descriptions of lightweight Web services (with the help of semantic annotation of REST services and WebAPIs�SAREST) and semantic or smart mashups (smashups) using Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., REST, AJAX) and microformats; (3) semantics at the middleware (communication, configuration, and adaptation); and (4) ontology-based profiling of people and organizational aspects of the assets associated with business and knowledge services, as well as semantic analysis of business requirements. Such processes would be critical to the agile businesses and innovative Web applications that are part of our global and networked economy.

BIO:
Amit Sheth is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar for Advanced Data Management and Analysis at Wright State University, where he directs the HYPERLINK "http://knoesis.wright.edu/" Kno.e.sis center for Knowledge enabled Information & Services Science (http://knoesis.org).

Earlier, he was a professor at the University of Georgia, where he founded and directed the LSDIS lab, widely recognized as a leading international research group in the areas of semantic Web, SOA and workflows. Before that, he served in R&D groups at Bellcore, Unisys, and Honeywell. His research has led to several commercial products and two successful companies in the areas of Workflow Management and Semantic Web, which he founded and managed in various executive roles.

Professor Sheth is an IEEE Fellow and has received recognitions such as the IBM Faculty award. He has published over 250 papers and articles many of which are highly cited (current h-index = 54, 24 with over 100 citations each), given over 200 invited talks and colloquia including 30 keynotes, (co)-organized/chaired 45 conferences/workshops, and served on around 120 program committees. He is on several journal editorial boards, is the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), joint EIC of Distributed & Parallel Databases Journal, and co-editor of two Springer Book Series.

From: "Using Semantics at Middleware, Web Services and Business Levels", CSIRO, 2008: