Challenges in electronic roads in the information society: content-based image retrieval and IP DiffServ

The objective of this study is to address some technological challenges that we faced within the Electronic Roads in the Information Society (ERIS) project. The main task of ERIS is to investigate an approach for dynamic construction of Electronic Roads, primarily of cultural content. An Electronic Road can be visualized as a virtual multidimensional information road, supported by a distributed digital library that contains digital information such as video, audio, images and text. The distributed digital library is accessed with intelligent means to ease navigation. ERIS has to resolve several issues in different disciplines such as Computer Networks, Digital Libraries, Co-ordination Models, Synchronization Models and System Design. In this paper, we restrict ourselves to investigate two key areas: Contend-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), and the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) to the networked services, or lack of it in the current Internet. To provide better QoS to the users, we investigate new recently proposed Internet architectures, which aim to provide rudimentary QoS through service differentiation, i.e. IP-DiffServ.