This chapter examines how the complexity of motivations and practices found in a specialist social networking site intersect with the institutions of intellectual property. The popular niche or specialist social networking site (SNS) called Ravelry, which caters to knitters, crocheters and spinners, is used as a case study. In this site people use, buy, sell, give away, and consume in a mixed economy that can be characterised as a ‘social network market’(Potts et al., 2008). In a co-creative social networking site we find not only a multidirectional and multi-authored process of co-production, but also a concatenation of amateurs, semi-professionals and professionals occupying multiple roles in gifting economies, reputation economies, monetised charitable economies and full commercial economies.
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User experiences emerge from the active participation in events or activities and lead to the accumulation of knowledge, skill and enjoyment. This is made possible by ever-growing amount of networked multimedia content (e.g., video, audio) and multimedia-intensive services (e.g., multimedia searching, annotation) together with growing number of mobile users and deep penetration of broadband Internet connections. Collaborative use of multimedia content and multimedia-intensive services empowers users to experience the real world and share it with other users. The above emerging technical phenomena is generalized with a term ‘Community Coordinated Multimedia’ (briefly, CCM) and is characterized with Web accessibility, Web service-driven, mobility, equal participativity, etc. (Zhou, Rautiainen, & Ylianttila, 2008a).
The shift towards CCM-driven user experience is manifested by several web services that have become popular in recent years, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, and Joost. However, they are more emphasizing on community membership management and multimedia sharing, and less in the support of multimedia-intensive services such as multimedia analysis and annotation.
There are amounts of efforts on generally addressing the issues of content annotation (Hansen, 2006) and retrieval (Croft, 1993; Rautiainen, 2006). There are also tools widely developed and applied for assisting users in the task of extracting, annotating, retrieving and mining multimedia content such as GATE with unicode-based text for supporting multilingual information extraction (Damljanovic, Tablan, & Bontcheva, 2008), ANVIL with frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation for multimodal dialogue (Kipp, 2004), and IBM VideoAnnEx annotation tool with MPEG-7 metadata (Lin, 2002). However, these tools are heavy weighted integrated multimedia processing software systems. Meanwhile they are not Web services-based.
Face detectors are studied for implementing our initial prototype, i.e., service-oriented face detection. The literature on cascade-structured detectors for faces and other objects are reviewed in (Wu, Brubaker, Mullin, & Rehg, 2008). A comprehensive review of other face detection approaches and techniques can be found in (Yang, Kriegman, & Ahuja, 2002). The cascade-structured face detectors such as Viola and Jones’ (Viola & Jones, 2004) and Wu et al.’s (Wu, Brubaker, Mullin, & Rehg, 2008) are mainly used in our experiments for test comparisons. In addition, there are many software libraries, examples of QuickTime for Java (Hoffert et al., 1992)(Chris Adamson, 2005), OpenCV (Gary Bradski, 2000), Java Media Framework (JMF) (Sullivan, Winzeler, Deagen, & Brown, 1998), open source MPlayer, that enable audio, video and other time-based media to be added to Java applications and provide various readymade functions for multimedia functionality and image processing, including face detection.
In this chapter we propose a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) SCCM solution and present an application for face detection by combining service-oriented computing and face detection techniques to tackle the emerging requirements characterized by the CCM-driven user experience, such as Web accessibility, discoverability, and community driven collaboration. On the one hand, service-orientation system design and technology exhibits strong potential in leveraging and reinforcing CCM system development in coordination, composiblity, discoverability, extensibility and agility of multimedia consumption via diversity executing environments. Existing Web services technologies, i.e., Web Service Description Language (WSDL) (W3C-WSDL, 2005), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) (SOAP, 2003), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) (UDDI, 2004) are widely used to actualize service-oriented solutions. On the other hand, the vision of community coordinated multimedia is very compatible with P2P technology. P2P technology has potential to become a powerful enabler that harnesses Web services to promote collaborative and coordinated multimedia computing and communication with its advantages of scalability, fault tolerance, dynamic networking, and collaboration support (Ylianttila et al., 2008).