Abstract Interest in the production and potential of digital images has increased greatly in the past decade. The main goal of a CBIR application is to find an image or a set of images that satisfy a user’s information need. This leads to the semantic gap problem, which is the difficulty of relating high level human interpretations with low-level recorded visual... Interest in the production and potential of digital images has increased greatly in the past decade. The main goal of a CBIR application is to find an image or a set of images that satisfy a user’s information need. This leads to the semantic gap problem, which is the difficulty of relating high level human interpretations with low-level recorded visual features. The synergy between ontology and region-based image annotations is possible to reduce the gap between image features and high-level semantics. Ontology query languages are used to retrieve information stored in ontologies. Unfortunately, users need to learn the syntax before being able to query using current ontology query languages. To overcome this problem, we present the Visual Ontology Query Language (VOQL) that interprets a visual image query into SPARQL. We show that VOQL can be used to retrieve desired images. Read More Read Less

Abstract Organizations today are faced with massive globalization, demanding customers with rapidly changing desires, shrinking response time, shrinking product lifecycles and demanding employees. This requires organizations to become fast, flexible, and participative and focused on customers, competition, teams, time and process. To respond to these forces, it is important to adopt a e-commerce in SMEs. In most developed countries SMEs constitute... Organizations today are faced with massive globalization, demanding customers with rapidly changing desires, shrinking response time, shrinking product lifecycles and demanding employees. This requires organizations to become fast, flexible, and participative and focused on customers, competition, teams, time and process. To respond to these forces, it is important to adopt a e-commerce in SMEs. In most developed countries SMEs constitute a highly dynamic and important sector of the economic activity that, nevertheless, has to deal with high competitive pressures and scarcity of resources. Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer SMEs significant opportunities to grow and to compete in the current business environment. This study aims to determine the current level of e-commerce adoption by SMEs in Jordan and clarifies the major business pressures facing organizations. Moreover, it gives a clarification of how e-commerce responses to these pressures. This was achieved by circulating a questionnaire to test the perception of e-commerce benefits and e-commerce adoption levels among SMEs from various sectors in Jordan and applying Turban model on SMEs in Jordanian environment. As such, it is required to help SMEs in raising electronic commerce and benefiting increasingly from e-commerce. It goes further to provide SMEs with business services that could make their trading activities. This study also elucidates these expected benefits from e-commerce and compares them with traditional SMEs to encourage all organizations to adopt and use of e-commerce in their businesses to remain competitive in rapidly changing environment. The results of this study indicate that even though a majority of respondents use e-commerce in the business activities and have their own Web site. Many respondents believed that a reduction in business pressures was a result of e-commerce adoption. In addition, external factors, such as customers and competitors had influence on the decision to adopt e-commerce. Read More Read Less

Abstract Empirical studies of the web traffic have found evidence of heavy tails in the distribution of file sizes. This empirically observed omni presence of heavy tails has serious concerns among researchers who are interested in analyzing characteristics of web server performance. Various methods for estimating tail index a are reviewed. They include the hill estimator, its alternatives, Weighted Hill estimator... Empirical studies of the web traffic have found evidence of heavy tails in the distribution of file sizes. This empirically observed omni presence of heavy tails has serious concerns among researchers who are interested in analyzing characteristics of web server performance. Various methods for estimating tail index a are reviewed. They include the hill estimator, its alternatives, Weighted Hill estimator and the qq-estimator. A new tail index estimator is also proposed which is obtained by smoothing the Weighted Hill estimator. Examples are given using simulated Pareto data and web server file size data of a University web server. Bootstrap confidence intervals and coverage probabilities are also computed. Read More Read Less

Abstract ... Read More Read Less

Abstract Complexity involved in heterogeneous multimedia networked environments makes difficult interoperability and automatic deployment of distributed multimedia systems. Indeed, diversity of standards, languages, protocols, and hardware components lead to important incompatibility issues when designing and developing multiplatform multimedia systems. Furthermore, user and community requirements and preferences should be taken into account when instantiating and con- figuring these kind of systems. This... Complexity involved in heterogeneous multimedia networked environments makes difficult interoperability and automatic deployment of distributed multimedia systems. Indeed, diversity of standards, languages, protocols, and hardware components lead to important incompatibility issues when designing and developing multiplatform multimedia systems. Furthermore, user and community requirements and preferences should be taken into account when instantiating and con- figuring these kind of systems. This work introduces an ontology framework for distributed multimedia systems design and deployment driven by user requirements. Case studies illustrating how distributed multimedia systems can be dynamically deployed are presented in order to demonstrate the advantages of using this framework. Read More Read Less

Abstract ... Read More Read Less

Abstract ... Read More Read Less