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End-to-end support for Quality of Service (QoS) has been broadly discussed in the literature. Many technologies have been proposed, each focusing on specific aspects for providing QoS guarantees to the end user. However, the integrated management of the end-to-end chain preserving QoS in heterogeneous environments is still a significant issue and insufficiently addressed to date. In this paper we propose an integrated management supervisor that takes into account the requirements from all stakeholders along the multimedia content delivery chain and provides an end-to-end management solution enabling QoS to the end user. This architecture and the subsystems that can be distributed along the end-to-end chain are detailed in this paper.

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The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. The resources that enable that process (social web sites, blogs, media objects, etc.) present growing complexity and, collectively, weave an ever more intricate web of relationships. Current technology for declaring those relationships is predominantly implicit, ambiguous and semantically poor. As a consequence, their automatic assessment is complex and error prone, preventing the satisfaction of users' needs such as effective semantic searches. To address these limitations, whilst enabling the explicit declaration of semantically unambiguous relationships between digital resources, a solution employing structured semantic descriptors and ontologies was conceived, based on MPEG-21. This paper explains the functioning of the devised mechanism, and goes beyond that, into the definition of two novel employment venues for it, at the service of two real-world usage scenarios. These demonstrate the mechanism's added value as a powerful alternative for the semantically aware interconnection of web resources, and highlight the increased QoE that said mechanism enables.

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