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Purpose: This paper aims to provide an overview of representative multimedia applications in the cultural heritage sector, as well as research results on quality of service (QoS) mechanisms in internet protocol (IP) networks that support such applications. Design/methodology/approach: The paper's approach is a literature review. Findings: Cultural heritage multimedia applications require greater bandwidth capacity, especially where multiple users share the connections. For such applications, scalability and reliability of quality of service depend on packet-level QoS mechanisms operating in a full end-to-end basis. Research limitations/implications: The paper provides a foundation for future research directions in the professional communication context. For instance, the QoS mechanisms in possible network infrastructures could be used to explore effective multimedia data dissemination across cultural heritage institutions. Practical implications: The paper provides an overview of which technologies/mechanisms are being used most broadly and which might provide the most potential for cultural heritage institutions managers considering experimenting in the multimedia communications area. Originality/value: QoS mechanisms that support multimedia applications in the cultural heritage sector need to become well known by cultural heritage institutions managers and professional associations in the fields of libraries, museums and archives. This paper provides a useful overview of the topic. (Contains 1 figure.)

Byline: Dimitris N. Kanellopoulos Tremendous potential for remote integration and collaboration in travel-related processes is provided by mashup web applications. Using various web applications, travellers have specific needs and experiences during the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages of various travel products. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that integrates travel-related web applications taking into account the three purchase stages. The proposed framework is generic as it can be applied to other sales domains on the web. The mashup web applications of the proposed framework assure the needs of travellers and enhance their ability on managing their web applications at each purchase stage, and thus to manage better their needs.

Byline: Dimitris N. Kanellopoulos Trying out or updating an existing learning ontology and providing evaluation tools to assess its quality are essential steps before putting an e-learning system online. Ontology evaluation is a crucial task and it is usually the output of an automatic process. This paper proposes an ontology-driven model, called Ontology-Driven model for the Evaluation of Learning Ontologies (ODELO), for the evaluation of ontologies representing learning resources with respect to syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, social and cohesion metrics. Syntax deals with the formal relations between signs (e.g., words, phrases, sentences) and the production of new ones. Semantics is the study of the relationships between the system of signs and their meanings. Pragmatics is the study of natural language understanding. Social metrics reflect the fact that software agents and ontologies coexist and communicate in communities. Ontology cohesion metrics refer to the degree of relatedness of ontology classes. ODELO is a deductive evaluation model that identifies the elements of ontological quality for learning ontologies. In this paper we propose a framework for assessing the quality of learning ontologies, which constitute the basis for intelligent educational Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) systems. We introduce a new pragmatic quality metric for assessing the quality of learning ontologies.

Byline: Dimitris N. Kanellopoulos Recently, multimedia computing turns into mobile, pervasive and context-aware. Adaptive multimedia computing is becoming the new paradigm for building complex information systems based on the use of different devices, web services and XML specifications. In dynamic environments, multimedia applications are potentially adaptive and are aware of their changing contexts. An intelligent context-aware infrastructure must be based on an appropriate context model such as to represent, manage and access context information. This paper proposes an ontology-based context model that supports context reasoning and context management for adaptive multimedia systems. The proposed model is flexible as it provides a general framework that can be applied to each multimedia application. Moreover, the model is extensible as it provides mechanisms to add new multimedia domain specifications.