MM

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 1st ACM Workshop on Multimedia Service Composition -- MSC'05 in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2005. Being a Brave New Topic at ACM Multimedia 2004 Conference the topic of multimedia service composition has recently gotten considerable attention. Service-oriented architectures are currently heavily researched and promise to introduce a maximum of flexibility and reusability of components also into multimedia applications. Composition of basic services to implement even complex workflows is a concept strongly discussed and researched in the Web community today. Web services are expected to take over an essential part of everyday's responsibilities and their composition is necessary to extend their benefits to more and more complex tasks and personalized value chains. Besides the efficient provisioning and improved reusability of components, the move from data-driven to service-driven architectures promises to open up a whole new field of value adding applications dynamically built on top of basic components and flexibly adapted for different user.

Building on the broad interest that last year's brave new topic session evoked, this workshop aims at assisting the multimedia community on their move from monolithic multimedia applications towards more flexible solutions. Such solutions could be provided either between content providers and clients or even peer-to-peer over the network. However, most Web-based concepts and constructs today suffer from being generally invariant to data types including the new datatypes that are being heavily explored in the multimedia community. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to start exploring multimedia service composition problems as a specific topic, including components, meta-data descriptions and their mutual dependence within value-adding workflows. Raising awareness for the basic problems this workshop will help to pave the way towards a more service-oriented multimedia applications design. Bringing together researchers from the multimedia and the Web community and offering a platform for discussions in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia conference series will thus hopefully create synergies with mutual value.

Putting together <i>MSC'05</i> was a team effort. First of all, we would like to thank the authors for providing the content of the program. We would like to express our gratitude to the program committee, who worked very hard and under a tight schedule in reviewing papers and providing suggestions for their improvements. Finally, we would like to thank our sponsor, ACM SIGMM, for their support of this workshop given that it is such a novel and challenging topic. We hope that you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking and that the workshop will provide a valuable platform to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.