Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Content Sensitivity requirements
refer to the sensitivity of the media con-
tent. A sensitive media content is associated with high security capabilities;
for example, secure transfer channel or encryption.
Output Storage requirements
refer to the storage destination of transcoded
media; for example, cloud storage, such as Amazon S3.
Delivery Time requirements
refer to the time when the transcoded media
will be ready for delivery (i.e. when the transcoded media is needed for use).
Delivery Channel requirements
refer to how the transcoded media is deliv-
ered; for example, to be delivered as a downloaded file, HTTP live streaming
over the internet, or mobile streaming over 3G network.
The proposed transcoding ontology adopts the terminology used by the media
industry. Many media people would be familiar with such high-level specifica-
tions rather than the details of hardware or software resources that need to be
deployed to perform transcoding tasks. Moreover, there are many different so-
lutions which can be used to implement the same transcoding task: developers
can use a
basic resource
facility and additionally install the transcoding software
themselves; alternatively, developers could use a
packaged resource
with pre-
installed software, such as the AWS resource pre-built with Wowza Transcoder
[1]. By using the proposed model, media users can specify an application's re-
quirements using appropriate terminology; this in turn allow developers to search
for the most suitable set of resources. It is up to developers to define a map-
ping algorithm which relates the domain-specific ontology to the infrastructure
constraints. Historical database can be used to facilitate the mapping process
by providing actual performance data. For example, in [6] several jobs are run
concurrently on a multi-core resource in order to meet a delivery deadline.
Financial service
sector is a challenging domain for infrastructure deploy-
ment [9]. It is highly regulated and demands high availability of resources. One
way to increase infrastructure resilience is to deploy mirror infrastructures lo-
cated in different geographical locations. Consider a financial company which
needs to revalue their customers' portfolios on a daily basis [9], the company
must comply with the UK Data Protection Act. The application service must
be made available 12 hours a day. Extra application services are required if sev-
eral large portfolios are to be revalued at the same time. These requirements can
be specified as:
Compliance: UK Data Protection Act 1998
Service hours required: 8am to 8pm, weekdays
Service performance: High response time; high availability;
high scalability; high disaster recovery
Portfolio valuation software: Supplied by users
A generic domain-specific ontology for financial services application is proposed
as follows:
Budget requirements
are the monetary constraints for running the financial
application, typically specified as a maximum spend per month.
