Being a Brave New Topic at ACM Multimedia 2004 Conference the topic of multimedia service composition has recently gotten considerable attention. Service-oriented architectures promise to introduce a maximum of flexibility and reusability of components into multimedia applications. Service composition 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 even complex tasks and 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.

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. Viable concepts, efficient frameworks, and promising applications (some even already considering business models for provisioning) have been investigated within the Web community during the recent years even leading to first standardizations. However, most of these 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. But with its effective handling of data the multimedia community already provides sophisticated standards for media coding accompanied with full meta-data descriptions (e.g. MPEG-7, MPEG-21) that promise to boost the useful concepts from Web services research. The benefit of bringing together novel Web-based service oriented concepts and the sophisticated handling and processing of multimedia data and annotations thus is mutual.

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. An especially important issue is the interoperability support for multimedia service composition ranging from consistency protocols to compose the services in a consistent fashion; service routing and QoS support during the composition process, to meta-data expressions and representations which include the web semantics and sophisticated multimedia characteristics. 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 create synergies with mutual value. We want to consider what the Web community developed in terms of service concepts (and the current standardizations) and bring to multimedia what is useful. But we also want to emphasize the differences and problems that multimedia service composition must solve outside of Web scope.