STEER Project

. It is therefore natural for users within this emerging social cyberspace to demand the kind of experiences they are accustomed to in their daily lives with the community type of communications being at the central stage. STEER addresses this community-centric digitally-based ecosystem which we refer to as “Social Telemedia”, a cross-breeding of social networks and networked media. Social Telemedia will further intensify current societal practices and habits and they will flourish on a new network middleware framework that will combine Social Informatics and Content Delivery. Social Informatics loosely refer to any digitized information that is generated or exchanged in the context of social networking whereas content delivery represents the communication medium through which social informatics are exchanged, only this time content could be delivered through a bundle of synchronised and heterogeneous flows to a community of users. In this context, the overall objective of STEER is to make significant advances in Social Telemedia research and practices, and engineer an operational Social Telemedia environment customized to support various innovative experiments. These experiments are oriented toward investigating the intrinsic nature of the Future Social Telemedia Lifecycle that revolves around communities, revealing new properties and patterns, creating new insights, and, exploring the synergy between Social Informatics and Networked Media delivery and its impact on user experience. To explore the Social Telemedia cyberspace, STEER has come up with two innovative use cases aspiring to cover the wide spectrum of community interactions that take place among members of dynamically instantiated communities while exploiting, discovering and correlating various forms of information. The uses cases will be deployed in the STEER experimental environment that is comprised of smart houses, ad-hoc communities and mobile devices combined with existing FIRE facilities such as OpenLab and EXPERIMEDIA. One key research question that STEER will investigate is how to extract context related information and how to discover correlations among various contexts that could be useful to a number of mechanisms e.g.