1. Diego R. Lopez, RedIRIS José María Fontanillo, RedIRIS Francisco Cruz, UC3M Nicolás Ibáñez, UC3M JRES2005, Marseille ARCA Federated Access to Multimedia Content

2. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Extending Media Services Requirements are growing beyond the live netcasting and/or streaming availability Authors want content accessed Consumers want content accessible The obvious response is the access portal  The broader the better Simple to use  Plug-and-play  Plug-and-be-played

3. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 The Fate of Common Directories Common directories are the usual answer to the problem of resource location in broad communities  But they face data partition  Formats, protocols, security (and privacy) considerations Participation requires a high effort  Staff and/or technological  And related to local visibility The result is the continuous re-building of central repositories of data  Almost automatically outdated with respect to their once local sources  Momentum decreases with time

4. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Federating Is Divine The federated model comes into play once again Accessing or collecting using trusted links  And a common language for data exchange Maintaining total autonomy for the federated repository  Policies  Methods  Interfaces  Local visibility Offering a common view of information  That can be enhanced for particular communities Keeping It Simple!

5. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 ARCA “Ark” in Spanish Agregador RSS para la Comunidad Académica (RSS Aggregator for the Academic Community)‏  http://arca.uc3m.es/ http://arca.uc3m.es/  http://arca.rediris.es http://arca.rediris.es Main goals  Harmonize and centralize all the information about available multimedia content.  Up-to-date information Specially, with respect to changes in each institution  Flexibility for participating institutions, so they can change announcements on their own And keep their own announcement systems In use by the RedIRIS community Being currently evaluated by TERENA  http://arca.terena.org http://arca.terena.org

6. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 The Architecture The system is divided into channels.  A channel represents a source of multimedia content Every institution is associated with one or more channels Each channel contains a series of events  Retransmissions and/or multimedia contents  Called “channel items” Each institution must generate data about its own channel(s)  As well as data for all the items to be transmitted through a given channel  By means of RSS elements

7. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 On RSS ARCA uses RSS 2.0 as exchange format  XML as markup  The more widespread format for content syndication and re- diffusion It allows for collecting data using off-the-shelf software (RSS aggregators)‏ Validation is simple, so it is possible to guarantee that each participant is making a correct data export Each participant can include additional information to its RSS description without affecting system behavior It allows for simple extension of system functionality

8. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 RSS Formats A general RSS format has been defined, with specific labels for each content type (direct, VoD, podcast)‏ UTF-8 is required No single RSS fulfills system requirements, so four different namespaces are in use:  Yahoo media RSS: Data about multimedia content  Itunes RSS: Data about multimedia content and podcasting  Google base RSS: Data about programmed events, dates and locations...  GeoRSS: Data about geographical information. New namespaces can be included as the system requirements evolve

9. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 The ARCA Database RSS descriptions are collected at well-defined endpoints The ARCA aggregator periodically connects and retrieves them The system consolidates into a single database all the information collected from the participating sources Through this database, information about channels and items can be accessed by means of the different ARCA search and browsing facilities

10. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Topology ARCA Server Internet RSS Cataloging/ Production Systems Updated every N hours Client. RSS Reader for PDA/PPC Client. RSS Reader Client. ARCA Portal University Research Center University Research Center University Multimedia Servers

11. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 The ARCA Portal Supports different search/browsing paradigms  Lists of events  Calendar  Queries on metadata  Browsing through different classifications Searches can be constrained according to institution, type of content, categories in a classification,... Multilingual support  Currently: Castilian, Catalan, Basque, Galician and English

12. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 The ARCA Portal - II Offers live RSS creation for queries  It is possible to subscribe to specific feeds Item playing  Embedded in the portal  External viewers Supports direct playing of podcasts  The portal can act as an “universal podcast player” Podcast friendly  The RSS for podcasts can be directly fed into readers  Tested with iTunes and many others Admin interface  Manage data sources  Manage categories

13. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Some Facts and Figures Based on open software  Apache, PHP5 and MySQL Twelve institutions currently participating + 2000 items available Two classifications in operation  Spanish Higher Education directives  UNESCO thematic classification Supported formats  Flash  MP3  MP4  Quicktime  RealPlayer  Windows Media

14. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Already in the Federation Universities  Universidad de Cantabria  Universidad Carlos III de Madrid  Universidad Politécnica de Madrid‏  Universidad del País Vasco  Universidad Rey Juan Carlos  Universidad de Vigo  UNED  The Madroño library consortium NRENs and regional networks  RedIRIS  CESGA Content providers  Liceu de Barcelona, for the Opera Oberta project Contacts with  TERENA  ISPs  Several other universities

15. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Community Software Channel statistics module  Already included in the portal  URJC ARCA item builder  Provides a simple GUI for channel and item definitions  UNICAN Joomla agent able to export to ARCA  UPM PuMuKIT  System for media cataloging  Compatible with any streaming technology  Able to generate local content portals  And ARCA channel descriptions  UVIGO

16. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 ARCA + PuMuKIT Ecosystem ARCA Server RSS Institution 1 Institution 2 WEB-TV PuMuKIT Streaming Server A WEB-TV RSS ARCA Portal Streaming Server B

17. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 ARCA vs Others A federation, not a central service  Flexibility  Local autonomy  Scalability  Diversity preservation Provides live events with geo-location (GeoRSS) Allows dynamic subscription using search results Can build podcast definitions for any media type supported by the system Can feed or be fed by any other portal using compatible RSS descriptions Can be used by any RSS aggregator

18. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 How To Federate Provide ARCA-compatible feeds at known URLs  A single RSS feed per channel  Several feeds per channel One per item type, one per year/month/day,... The only requirement is to use the same channel title Use whatever combination of the four supported namespaces  Yahoo Media RSS: Media characteristics, rights, keywords, thumbnails, credits and roles, languages and playing choices.  Google Base RSS: Dates (for an event or a video), location, pictures  Itunes: Media characteristics and compatibility with the iTunes player  GeoRSS: Geographical location

19. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Some Caveats ARCA mandates the use of UTF-8  Feeds must explicitly include it  The server must honor content encoding HTML code must use character entities  To avoid confusing the parser  Incorrect The workshop will discuss web 2.0 applications. The program is available here.  Correct The workshop will discuss web 2.0 applications. The program is available <a href="http://www.uc3m.es/jornadasW2/">aquí</a>.

20. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Basic Description Structure...............

21. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining a Channel Universidad Carlos III de Madrid http://audiovisuales.uc3m.es/ Videos bajo demanda y eventos transmitidos por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid audiovisuales@uc3m.es http://audiovisuales.uc3m.es/logo.jpg Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Audiovisuales http://audiovisuales.uc3m.es/ Optional: language, copyright, managingEditor, pubDate, lastBuildDate, generator, docs, ttl, textInput, category

22. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining an Item: General data Robótica: actuadores y sensores http://roboticlab.uc3m.es/ Sensores de localización y... pperez@di.uc3m.es (Pablo Pérez) http://roboticlab.uc3m.es/cursopp/ Ciencias tecnológicas Enseñanzas Técnicas a03b11c32d05 http://roboticlab.uc3m.es/image1.jpg http://roboticlab.uc3m.es/image2.jpg sensores,actuadores,gps Creative Commons

23. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining an Item: Multimedia

24. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining an Item: Play choices...

25. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining an Item: Credits/Roles Andrés Pérez Carmen Gómez Silvia Toro Paco Puertas Nuria Prieto

26. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining a Live Event 2006-12-20T14:00:00 2006-12-20T19:00:00 Plaza Manuel Gómez Moreno, s/n - Madrid 40.331480 -3.766730

27. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Defining a VoD or Podcast General 2006-12-20 Podcasts iTunes compatibility Pablo Pérez Módulo 1a Sensores de localización y actuadores eléctricos 01:23:40 sensores,actuadores,gps

28. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 And More To Come Dynamic endpoint definition Push model Ad-hoc creation for items dealing with sparse live events at the portal Support for groups of events (courses, workshops,...) when searching/browsing ARCA specific namespace Different browsing alternatives Display of related items Support for other item types Support for federated identity when searching, browsing and playing content

29. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 Concluding ARCA provides a new paradigm to access media content produced by the academic community  Based on a federated approach  Flexibility, local autonomy, scalability, diversity preservation Aligned with the EC goals on digital repositories in the VII Framework Program What we are seeking for  Support for consolidating and deploying the technology  Expanding the federation http://arca.rediris.es/ http://arca.uc3m.es/ arca@listserv.rediris.es

30. Internet2 Member Meeting. October 2007 The Long Awaited Demo