ROCK: A Characterization Methodology for Web Multimedia Services Based on an Informational Hierarchy

Despite the increasing popularity of multimedia content in the Brazilian Web, we still do not understand much about the dynamics of how such content is consumed. The majority of previous characterization strategies focuses on data access, employing dimensions such as users and sessions and ignoring content-related information that may be potentially relevant. In this work we present ROCK, a novel characterization methodology of multimedia web services that has four parts: Request, Object, Content, and Knowledge. Besides quantitative characterization criteria, the methodology employs a segmentation-based analysis to grasp the semantic characteristics of the delivered content. We apply our methodology to real data from a distributor of corporate's multimedia content, demonstrating its applicability and usefulness.