A Multimedia-Specific Approach to WS-Agreement

WS-agreement offers a general language and protocol to establish agreements between two parties. In principle, this generality enables a wide variety of domains to be covered. Yet, agreement terms need to be developed for each domain, to allow specific requirements to be expressed. When addressing a domain, one can either invent new agreement terms, or leverage on existing approaches. This paper proposes to extend the WS-agreement framework to address multimedia content negotiation. This work relies on an existing protocol for multimedia negotiation, widely used in networking and telecommunications, named session description protocol. This protocol is used as a framework to cover a variety of media (audio, video, images...). Besides building on a well-proven technology, our approach naturally allows the interfacing between the Web services realm and the networking-telecommunications realm, creating a host of new usage opportunities. Our work is illustrated by two case studies: image/audio downloading and audio/video streaming