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Telecom operators have started to make significant investments towards evolving their Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) to a next-generation architecture, based on IP technologies and standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and increasingly, Web 2.0. These investments are tightly coupled with demands for network middleware infrastructures that allow for rapid service creation and execution, efficient service orchestration and management, and flexible exposure of core network capabilities as services. A key service management functionality of integrated SDP is IP-based service control. Traditionally, service control functionalities have been vertically integrated with service logic and hence, are inflexible and costly to maintain and upgrade. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which defines the overlay service architecture for next generation networks, stopped short in designing a flexible service control component. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a service control layer (SCL) for IMS networks, which is flexible on two fronts, viz., the SIP based service modeling for fine grained service control and the programmability of the controlling action implemented by external business services. We present the detailed description of the design and implementation of SCL followed by the results obtained from a performance evaluation exercise that evaluates the scalability of SCL.

With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to discover Web pages that are relevant to a topic. To address this problem we are developing a system that allows the collection and analysis of Web pages related to a particular topic. In this paper we present the system’s overall architecture and introduce the focused crawler used by the system. We also discuss the various techniques we use to allow the user to analyze and gain useful insights about a collection. Finally, we present some statistics on the collections.

With the recent explosive growth in the volume of images on the World-Wide Web, it has become increasingly difficult to search for images of interests. The classification of images helps users to access a large image collection efficiently. Classification reduces search space by filtering out unrelated images. Classification also allows for more user-friendly interfaces: users can better visualize easily result space by browsing the representative images of the candidates. In this paper, we present a technique for image classification based on color, shape and composition using the primary objects. We apply this classification technique in image matching for image retrieval on the Web. Our experimental results show that this approach can maintain 73% of recall by searching only 24% of the whole data set. We also show how we apply such technique to assist users in navigation.

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World Wide Web. However, most of the popular search engines today are textuals they do not allow the user to find images from the Web. This paper describes AMORE, a Web search engine that allows the user to retrieve images from the Web by specifying relevant keywords or a similar image. Text and image search can also be combined. Moreover, we have developed a Query Result Visualization Environment that allows the organization of the results if many images are retrieved. In this paper we present AMORE’s user interface and explain the technique for retrieving images visually similar to a user specified image. The method of automatically assigning relevant keywords to the images is then explained. Finally, the architecture of the system as well as some interesting observations of our experiences with AMORE are discussed.

With the explosive growth of information in the WWW, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find information of interest. Visualisations may be helpful in assisting the users in their information retrieval task. Effective visualisation of the structure of a WWW site is extremely useful for browsing through the site. Visualisation can also be used to augment a WWW search engine when too many or too few results are retrieved. In this paper, we discuss several visualisations we have developed to facilitate information retrieval on the WWW. With VRML becoming the standard for graphics on the Web and efficient VRML browsers becoming available, VRML was used for developing these visualisations. Unique visualisations like focus + context views of WWW nodes and semantic visualisation are presented and examples are given on scenarios where the visualisations are useful.