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Enhancing Availability of Information and Towards Freedom of News Distribution:

Supporting Small-scale News Agencies with a Web-Service Infrastructure

(Author names removed for double-blind review)

Abstract

Broadband Internet enables high-speed transmission of data but it does not guarantee availability of information (AOI) or freedom of news distribution, both of which are foundations of democracy. These require an efficient way to let news distributors and users aware of the existence of matching news suppliers before starting the distribution. The current news distribution networks are domineered by large-scale agencies, creating barriers to small-scale news agencies, which might have alternate information sources, inside stories, and alternative views. In this paper, we explain how Web services can enhance AOI and help regional news media open new business opportunities by engaging them into the news agency market. An implementation framework of Web services in the news business is proposed. We explore various approaches to make use of Web services to improve business practices in the news industry. We further analyze the possible difficulties to implementation and suggested ways to alleviate the difficulties.

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1. Introduction

As proposed by Barnett [1], the first component of democracy is “a more knowledgeable citizenry, whose understanding of issues and arguments is fostered by the availability of relevant, undistorted information.” To prevent information being limited or distorted by the viewpoints of the few mega-agencies, it is necessary to enhance the availability of information (AOI) by extending the sources of news materials.

In this paper, news media refers to those who publish news to the public (on paper, radio, television, Internet, and so on). News materials they use come mainly from their in-house reporters and purchases from agencies. News agencies refer to those who do business by gathering news materials (such as text, photos, graphics, video, and so on) and then selling to the media. Most news agencies are also publishing news on their web sites or doing other publishing business, that is, they are also the news media.

AOI is a multi-layered concept. The public obtains news from the news media and the media obtain (non-local) news materials from agencies. A higher level of AOI to the news media makes a higher level of AOI to the public possible. In this paper we focus on how technology can change the trading model of small-scale agencies and therefore enhances AOI to the media. Higher AOI to the media will finally be reflected in higher AOI to the public. Higher awareness of international events and development enables people to better exercise their participation rights in democracy with global insights as well as true and fair news.

Currently, the news agency market is dominated by a small number of giant global mega-agencies, which are mostly American or British based [2, 3]. News materials offered by these mega-agencies are filtered by their editors before feeding to customers. Their perspectives in reporting and selecting news materials will more or less influence or restrict freedom of speech of their customers, who are mass media around the world. This inevitable has negative impacts on freedom of news (and speech) and hence on the development of democracy.

At the same time, there are plenty of high quality and interesting news materials in the hands of local news media. They often have alternate information sources, inside stories, and alternative views. However, because of inefficient AOI, it is difficult to let foreign media know the existence of such materials. On one hand, local media loss the chance to increase revenue by selling their in-house materials overseas; on the other hand, they cannot enjoy alternative material sources and therefore unwilling strengthen the monopoly status of mega-agencies by relying heavily on them.

Because “a picture’s worth a thousand words,” multimedia news materials are the focus of current trend of media’s reporting practices. As compared with text, good multimedia news materials are often more trustworthy and generates a greater impact to readers. Although the spread of text-based news has been relatively straightforward, there is much difficulty in the proper spreading of multimedia news materials in the current practices. Further because of the costs of multimedia news materials and the technology involved in its searching, their spreading is often manual and tedious. This seriously affects AOI.

To solve these problems, this paper proposes a technical framework based on Web services. We explain how it can enhance AOI and help regional news media open new business opportunities by engaging them into the news agency market. We explore various approaches to make use of this infrastructure to improve business practices in the news industry as well as enable other organizations or even individuals to participate in news distribution. This all help the development of democracy through AOI and freedom of news distribution. We further analyze the possible difficulties to the implementation and suggested ways to alleviate the difficulties.

In the rest of this paper, section 2 introduces the current business model of the news business and points out the existing problems. Section 3 details now Web services and a bunch of related technologies enable our proposed implementation framework. Section 4 discusses the applicability of our approach and how some possible barriers could be overcome. Section 5 concludes the paper with some directions of future research.

2. Background and Related Work

In modern history, we see that information technologies have contributed significantly to political and social changes. Along with the advancement of information technologies and improvement of AOI, the traditional division of governments between the left and the right has changed over years. Soviet socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Russia because, as Shane [4] argues, these countries could not maintain state monopoly of information in face of challenges of information flows enabled by new technologies. Mainland China faced the same challenges. Their response was an abrupt reform to change from Soviet socialism into market-oriented socialism that could better adapt to information flows [5]. At the same time there emerged an entirely new form of governance called Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). NGOs are loose affiliations of people based on special interests such as environmentalism and human rights. Examples of NGO include Greenpeace and Human Rights. There is a huge variety and density of such third-sector groups in the world today, benefiting from the inexpensive information technologies [6] as well as AOI. Although NGOs cannot create institutions that anyone would call a government, they do have the power to constrain companies and governments from taking actions that harm the interests of the poor and the environment or adversely affect the development of democracy. The following subsections discuss how information technologies help the mass media and the information spreading channels.

1. The problem of small-scale news agencies

Currently, valuable local news collected by local news media is hard to be discovered and used in foreign markets, if not via the few large agencies. Besides economic interest, cultural values being threatened by the US-dominated media apparatus is also a common concern [7]. Most local news media could only do publication business. Though more efficient and professional in collecting local news materials, local news media is difficult to extend their business to sell news materials to international markets. There are many regional news agencies but their businesses are more or less restricted to their geographic regions they belong to. If there are any alternative outlets, high quality news could generate much larger and stable revenue by directly supplying to news partners and users than to these mega-agencies.

News is a highly perishable goods. Old news is not news. A piece of news material may worth thousands of dollars today but may worth not a cent tomorrow. Other than reliability and trustfulness, speedy and low cost transaction and transmission is vital for news materials. To ensure this, media are often forced to maintain a permanent news-feed connection with these mega-agencies.

Many newsroom editors have already felt this as a problem. There is a growing trend for the media to send more and more crews overseas to cover important events and relying less on these monopolized news feeds. However, on one hand it is a costly exercise and on the other hand penetration of the reports is often too shallow because the crews are unfamiliar with oversea situations. Nonetheless, arranging a crew go oversea requires time for planning and preparation. They could help little in covering unexpected incidents like train crash or explosions.

Ad-hoc news material transaction and transmission has been costly, difficult, and slow. However, we have seen that AOI is gradually improving over the years along with the advancement of information technologies. About two decades ago, if a newsroom wanted to buy a picture from another newsroom or ad-hoc sources, the editor had to make phone calls to his business partner(s) to confirm the availability of the wanted materials and have the prices and terms negotiated. Then, the materials (films, enlarged photos, tapes, etc.) have to be handed over manually by means of express-delivery, such as local delivery by bikes or cars, and international or long-distance delivery via courier services.

A decade ago when digitalized pictures and the Internet became popular, news editors still needed to make manual arrangements. Only could the transmission of materials (digitalized pictures) be facilitated through FTP, emails, etc., to the newsroom.

Nowadays when every business owns a webpage, some smaller news agencies post sample materials on their web sites and wait for media customers to come by [8-11]. If a newsroom editor wants to buy pictures from them, manual surfing through many of such photo-sites one-by-one is still necessary. Downloading is easy, but browsing and searching through each site is too time-consuming to be done repeatedly and regularly.

In summary, in the current operation model, it is very time consuming for the media to discover alternative news sources on demand. Because of inefficient AOI, most news media have to rely heavily on a few mega-agencies for non-local news material supplies. Newsroom-to-newsroom material exchange does sometimes happen but is largely restricted to local partners. These exchanges are usually done on cordial non-financial terms. Exchanges between international pairs are rare, unless they are running under the same corporation. Insufficient AOI hinders free flows of views and facts internationally and therefore has a negative impact on the fundamental of democracy.

2. The quest for multimedia

We further explain the need of the quest for multimedia news materials in this section. With the advance of Internet technologies, information transmission has been revolutionized. Text-based news abstracts are spreading fast but they are frequently inadequate for reporting purposes by the news media, unless accompanying photos or videos are available. The old cliché “A picture’s worth a thousand words” is more than the truth in the news business. In newspaper, TV news, or Internet news, good headlines must be accompanied by good pictures. A good story with no pictures cannot make good news. In this paper, we call these pictures (including still photographs, movies, and other graphic illustrations) as news materials. Text-based news stories spread fast by hear-saying and rewriting so that they become “knowledge of events” and are spreading freely. But pictures do have copyrights and cannot be easily rebuilt. The most hunted element in the news media is often pictures rather than stories. Very often, these news materials do exist with abundant supply, but are simply not discovered quickly enough before they become useless. Speedy discovery of information is as important as speedy transmission of information.

“No picture, no news?” Why pictures are so important for news reporting? Currently, it is a common practice for the press to print a picture (very often a large picture) in the front page describing the headline story. A story without pictures, no matter how good the story is, cannot become headline story. Conversely, a not-so-interesting story with an interesting picture has the potential to become the headline. In some countries, newspapers are fully color-printed in the way that they look more like a magazine than a newspaper. In such situation, pictures become even more important for the press. Here are some social and business reasons:

• There is advancement in printing technology and paper quality.

• It is a business strategy for the press to use higher quality papers in order to attract more expensive advertisement with high quality graphics. When the paper is good enough to print a photo-like picture, editors are asked to present stories with graphics and pictures rather than relying on only text.

• Advertisers want newspapers to “beautify” the news content by using more pictures because a “good-looking” paper attracts more readers and thus higher exposure for the advertisement.

• It is also a business strategy for the press to upgrade themselves to look like magazines. Newspapers are trying to extent business into the magazine market.

• Popularity of cartoons, comics, etc., shows that the younger generation likes “reading” graphical presentations more then texts.

3. Legacy News-feeds

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Figure 1. The operation of legacy news-feeds

As shown in Figure 1, one major problem of the news industry is that these permanent news-feed connections used by different agencies are not inter-operable. There are many possible protocols for transmitting news materials between business partners. Common ones include EDI, DCOM, and CORBA.

Electronic Data Interface (EDI)[12] was used since early 1980’s and is a proven solution for data exchange between companies. EDI is complex and inflexible. It is relatively expensive to implement, maintain, and deploy.

Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM)[13] and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)[14] are newer data exchange technologies using object-oriented approach and support remote procedure call (RPC). However, Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)[13] and CORBA are both platform-specific. Furthermore, both DCOM and CORBA require that certain ports be opened in the firewall to accommodate transmission of their messages.

These connections are costly to set up and troublesome to make changes. Different agencies are using different formats to deliver materials, adding difficulty to the news media in processing and archiving. Besides, there is also a security concern. Using an assortment of protocols requires the news media to open up many ports in its company firewall, increasing the risk of intrusion.

4. XML and NewsML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a meta-markup language that provides a format for describing structured data. XML is recognized as the foundation for business data integration, providing the mediation between diverse data structures and formats as data is exchanged between applications. Because the XML standard is a based on ASCII strings, XML can be used across multiple platforms as well.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)[15] is a specification built on top of XML. It is a common, extensible message format, allowing transfer information across platform boundaries and between companies on different networks. It can be easily integrated into existing systems. As SOAP is transported over HTTP protocols for communication, it is also firewall friendly.

If news materials could be represented in XML and transmitted through SOAP, format incompatibility problems will be solved. In recent years there has been efforts in developing an XML-based news transmission language, called NewsML [16]. NewsML is an XML-based standard approved by International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)[17] in October 2000 aimed at improving news exchange. It is designed to represent and manage news throughout its lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use.

NewsML supports the representation of electronic news entities such as news-items, parts of news-items, collections of news-items, relationships between news-items, and metadata associated with news-items. It allows news-items to consist of arbitrary mixtures of media types of languages and encodings.

Since its introduction, some news agencies are starting to use NewsML for transmitting news materials to customers. NewsML is a signification kick-start for standardizing news exchange formats. However, NewsML is not very popular in the news industry yet. According to the statistics of ITPC, at the time when this paper is written, there are only 16 content providers in the world using NewsML [16]. Besides, NewsML is currently used mainly as a formatting guide only. It solved part of the problem, standard formatting, but the business is still sticking to traditional transmission architectures and logistics.

What the news industry needs is not just a formatting standard. The lack of a standard communications infrastructure is a major hurdle for data exchange and discovery within and between organizations (and thus AOI) in the news industry.

3. A Web Service Based Solution

Some local news agencies set up web pages waiting customers to pick and buy their pictures and other news materials. The intention to make use of Internet technologies to extend business is good. But when there are thousands of such web pages around the world, it is impossible for media editors (as customers) to browse them manually.

So, we propose regional news media and agencies wishing to extend their business opportunity internationally could set up XML-based Web services to allow programmable querying and transaction of news materials through the Internet, as summarized in Figure 2. What makes Web services different from ordinary web sites is that web sites are designed to provide a response to a request from a person, while Web services are designed to response to requests from client programs without the need of human interactions. We detail our technical solution in this section.

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Figure 2. A regional media discovers and buys news materials from other regional media overseas through Web services.

1. What is a Web service?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines Web services as: “A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.” [18] “Web Services are no more and no less than distributed applications that run across heterogeneous networks using HTTP protocols and XML data formats.” [19] “Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks.” [18]

After establishing its Web services, a news agency could publish information about its services to the directory of Web services called Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) [20]. UDDI is a searchable directory of businesses and their Web services. It enables enterprises to quickly and dynamically discover and invoke Web services.

Web services opens up new business opportunities. It eases integrating disparate systems of different enterprises, lowers the cost of discovering and negotiating with business partners [21] and reduces security risks of opening connections with new partners. Web services are now becoming more and more popular for e-business. In Web-service architecture, each component is regarded as a service, encapsulating behavior and providing the behavior through an API available for invocation over the Internet. This is the logical evolution of object-oriented techniques in e-business. “The main objective of Web services has been to provide a service abstraction that allows interoperability between applications built using disparate platforms and environments. There is now a way to incorporate web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) into a meaningful architecture for integrating applications and services into a backbone that spans the extended enterprise in a large-scale fashion.”

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Figure 3. UDDI acting as a public WS directory

Any news media around the world could use their own interfaces to search and locate potential news material vendors from UDDI and then query the vendors through Web services for details of materials available. If the materials are suitable, the news media could make payment and download materials through the vendors’ Web services.

The UDDI specification includes two categories of APIs for accessing UDDI services from applications:

• Publishers APIs – allow applications to register services with the registry. Materials vendors could automate the publishing and updating process within their normal business procedures.

• Inquiry APIs – enable lookup and browsing of registry information. Buyers could automatic the UDDI lookup process within their normal editing procedures too.

Figure 3 summarizes the mechanism. Arrow 1 is done through publishers APIs and arrow 2 is done through inquiry APIs. Arrow 3 is SOAP messages communication between the WS provider and WS requester.

The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) defines a standard way for specifying the details of a Web service. It is a general-purpose XML schema that can be used to specify details of Web service interfaces, bindings, and other deployment details. By having such a standard way to specify details of a service, clients who have no prior knowledge of the service can still use that Web service [22].

When an enterprise publishes its Web services, it sends its WSDL document (or its URL) to a UDDI. The registry contains the WSDL information of all the currently available components/operations within the framework. Results of the search query are the concrete binding parameters (protocol, URL, operation signature, etc.) of the matching operations. Finding a suitable match automatically is done by searching in the registered WSDL files for the specified “semantic descriptions”.

2. A Typical Usage Scenario

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Figure 4. Sequence diagram showing interaction of the news media WS and news agency WS.

Figure 4 shows a typical usage scenario of Web services for news distribution in a sequence diagram of the Unified Modeling Language. We explain it as follows:

1. A media periodically searches the UDDI to update its list of news materials sources.

2. The client system collects text-based abstracts from these sources, and then filters and classifies them.

3. The news editor of a media reads text-based story abstracts to choose suitable stories for reporting.

4. The client system extracts keywords from the selected stories and automatically sends queries messages to Web services of news agencies to ask for relevant materials.

5. When relevant materials are found, news agencies replies with attached thumbnail pictures/videos of the chosen stories to the client.

6. The news editor browses through the thumbnails, which are all relevant to his chosen stories, to choose news materials. He puts the chosen materials in a shopping basket.

7. When confirmed to checkout, the system automatically makes online payments to the various vendors and downloads the full-size pictures/videos.

3. In this paper, we focus on the formulation of an enterprise MAIS infrastructure and system integration aspects. Therefore, we mainly discuss steps 1 to 7. The rest of the methodology deals with the detail design of agents and has been preliminarily studied in our previous work (Chiu et al. 2004).

4. Sample Web Services Interfaces

In order to support the operations as described in the previous sub-section, we illustrate the main Web services required by the news agencies as following services:

• Service Name: countSearchResult

Purpose: Count the number of available related materials

Input: materialType, keywordList, fromDate, toDate

Response: count

• Service Name: listSearchResult

Purpose: obtain a list of links to the material suppliers

Input: materialType, keywordList, fromDate, toDate

Response: materialIdList, descriptionOfMaterials

• Service Name: listSearchResultLong

Purpose: obtain a list of material thumbnails with links to suppliers

Input: materialType, keywordList, fromDate, toDate

Response: materialIdList, descriptionOfMaterials, thumbnailContents

We are working towards this ultimate goal.

5. Encoding problem

Multimedia news materials are binary data that needs encoding before transmitting through HTTP. The SOAP specification defines SOAP attachments as a way to include Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) data in or associated with SOAP messages. At present there are two specifications for attachment: SOAP with Attachments [23] and WS-Attachments [24]. Figure 5 illustrates the structure of SOAP with Attachment.

Working with attachments may cause some interoperability problems because of mixed J2EE and .NET environment. One way to avoid problems is not to use attachments but to embed the data within the SOAP message [25].

The XML Protocol Working Group of the W3C Web Services Activity proposed a new way to embed binary data in SOAP messages: “The Abstract SOAP Transmission Optimization Feature enables SOAP bindings to optimize the transmission and/or wire format of a SOAP message by selectively encoding portions of the message, whilst still presenting an XML Infoset to the SOAP application.”[26]

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Figure 5. Using MIME packaging for non-XML data [27]

It is helpful to keep binary data in the SOAP message infoset rather than sending it as a separate attachment. When data is within the infoset, it operates within the constraints of the SOAP processing model. It allows controlling the processing of the infoset using SOAP headers [25].

4. Applicability and Discussions

In this section, we discuss how this technical framework can be adopted to facilitate AOI, freedom of speech, and hence support the development of democracy. As in other industries, we expect a gradual adoption and explain in subsequent sub-sections about the following phases:

1. Existing news agencies form around the world could form loose amalgamations for mutual benefit, supporting new business models and streamlining existing ones.

2. News e-marketplace specializing in building up search systems based on Web services could be established for ad-hoc and different scales of cooperation.

3. The infrastructure further enables other organizations (especially political and public ones) and even individuals to participate in news distribution.

4. Intelligent search and comparison can be established for the evaluation of information from different sources. This facilitates the media and the public to discover the truth in more complete angles and overcome other existing barriers.

1. Web services support new and old business models

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Figure 6. A news media could directly view and buy news materials of other media through SOAP messages.

Web services allow very flexible business arrangements. In one extreme, the news media and the news agency do not need to have prior agreement or contract before doing transactions. Web services provide a casual relationship between clients and servers, allowing just-in-time and peer-to-peer discovery. All connections may be ad-hoc, dynamic, and determined by editor’s choice of stories. The uncertainty factor in news material supply can be minimized when there are lots of news materials available around the world. This could result in lower prices, wider choices, and higher quality. On the other hand, Web services also support the traditional subscription business mode in which the media signs a long-term contract with various agency partners for daily regular news feeds.

Since news feed time is limited, currently news editors of news agencies have to decide what materials could be valuable to their clients. News editors of media could only pick from the pre-picked materials supplied. In such batch-collect-and-then-select practice, news editors of media are losing some of their sovereignty in reporting the news with materials they want. Transmission bandwidth is wasted on sending unwanted materials to clients.

With the help of Web services, news media editors could decide what materials they want and then through Web service messages request their picked list from agencies. Only the materials requested are sent over the Internet to the media. Transmission bandwidth will not be wasted by sending unwanted materials. In such select-before-collect practice, each subscriber could obtain the optimum material contents from suppliers in minimum transmission time and resources, and probably at a lower price too.

News media looking for and downloading data is called a “pull model” [28]. Working the other way round is also possible. News media could also write a Web service that accepts requests from news agencies (vendors) to compete for purchases. News agencies could use the registry to find potential buyers around the world. Those vendors look for potential buyers and then approach customers to make offers is called a “push model.”

As a result, this facilitates the formation of repository of news materials by groups of small-scale news providers. Small-scale providers with mutual trust could form a union inter-connected by Web services. If they have a proper assortment of materials to provide and running at a competitive price, they could win some of the market share from the traditional large agencies against their monopoly.

2. News e-marketplace and middleman

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Figure 7. A news media could also access news materials of other media through a middleman.

There could also be online news agencies specializing in building up search systems based on Web services. A possible evolution could be those successful and experienced groups emerged to provide public services and become middlemen. These middlemen could build-up computer-to-computer interface as well as web-based interactive systems for other news media to search for available news materials from local agencies as well as those around the world for news material supply.

As a reward, these middlemen could get a commission from any successful purchase. No matter what business model to adopt, international transactions involve international payment. It is facilitated by the well-established e-commerce infrastructure. It is not surprised to see some banks or credit card companies accepting transaction instructions through Web services as well. Figure 8 illustrates how such payment could typically be carried out.

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Figure 8. Payments made through international banks or credit card companies

In this way, platforms of news e-marketplaces are established for different scales of ad-hoc and world-wide co-operations.

3. Springing of smaller and alternative news source

With new platforms of news e-marketplace as well as new business models, it is expected that not only can news media or agencies open their material sources in the next wave of development. All kinds of organizations, including political parties, government departments, academic institutions, trade unions, voluntary bodies, and even individuals could also publish their news and their own opinion through these new infrastructures. This is possible because they need not set up their own facilities, but just participate in news e-marketplaces.

Freedom of news (or speech) and AOI have to accompany each other. In the current globalized society, one has the right to express idea, but cannot ensure that other people on the other side of the world could hear you. Even if international communication channels are established, it still needs heavy effort and cost to let the appropriate audiences to discover and listen. If that cost is too high, both freedom of speech and the right to obtain information are limited. Therefore, such platforms and mechanisms are our ultimate goal of AOI under which news freedom could be adequately supported.

In response to this movement, undoubtedly the mega-agencies will follow suit to extend its source of materials by the same skill. Competition means improvement. Mega-agencies will still be there, but the news industry will become more competitive and open. It will soon benefit all final consumers of the mass media: this means everybody.

4. Overcoming Problems and Barriers

Before concluding this paper, we discuss how our proposed framework together with evolving technologies can help overcoming some key problems and barriers.

Truthfulness – Reputation and trust is important in the news business. Is one selling a genuine picture? Is one authorized to sell/resell property rights of that picture? Within a local area, people know which agencies or media are more trustful than the others. Over time, especially through e-marketplaces and other commentary agencies, the news industry can eventually develop some kinds of global reputation index systems to help the media to choose reliable agencies as news material suppliers. We cannot absolutely prevent people from maliciously making false descriptions and statements on the materials they are selling. But with a reputation index, we could reduce the risk by using the index as one of the criteria in querying for news materials.

Quality of search results – If queries are returning too many irrelevant items or missing out too many relevant items, it defeats the purpose of efficient searching and discoveries. Current searching technology is admittedly imperfect but still not too bad. This could be improved by the introduction of ontology-based knowledge management to enable implementation of Semantic Web: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation [29].” Semantic Web allows enhanced information access based on exploitation of machine-processable meta-data. The W3C is developing metadata standards for the Semantic Webto ensure that Web information make sense by providing a representation of data on the Web that includes the meaning. Further, intelligent search and comparison can be formulated for the evaluation of information from different sources. This facilitates the media and the public to discover the truth in more complete angles and overcome other existing barriers.

Language – The Internet is currently English-dominated and therefore the news business is also English-dominated. To improve that, descriptions and keywords need to be in English or multilingual. Further, volunteers or paid personnel can easily participate via news e-marketplaces for translation work. In addition, evolving technologies in machine translation should also help.

Slow return of investment for pioneers – A global Web service-based news material framework requires enough participants to enable it to become effective. At the beginning when the number of participants is small, benefit of the framework may not immediately cover the investment cost. However, as Web services can be used in many different aspects of business operation, more and more mass media managers will recognize that extending Web services to material sources is not as expensive as it seems. Hopefully the number of participants in the framework will catch up quickly.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, we have discussed some of the background relating AOI, freedom of news (and therefore speech), and the support for democracy. We also examine some of the existing problems of the news industry facing these aspects. To overcome these problems, we have proposed a technical infrastructure based on Web services technologies. We have explained how gradual adoption is possible by phase and how this infrastructure could enhances AOI for the news industry. In particular, this enhances AOI to the news media by introducing more competition in the news agency market. Given wider material sources, news media will eventually be able to spread news more effectively and efficiently. That means freer flow of information with lower discovery cost, less monopoly by the mega-agencies, and more competition in the news agency market. We have also discussed how some potential problems and barriers could be overcome with our proposed solution together with emerging technologies.

Thus, news media may enjoy more varied material sources and perhaps in lower cost. Particularly with the help of emerging technologies, this helps the public to know the truth and more truth. Also through such platforms and infrastructures, more trustful and less biased information could bring about more freedom of speech by routing to the appropriate audiences in order to provide the fundamental and ultimate support for democracy.

This work can be expanded in several directions. As Web services enable news agencies to form virtual enterprises, we are applying recent technologies from enterprise content management into this framework. We are interested in the use of watermark to reinforce the integrity and rights protection of multimedia news materials. We are also investigating in the application of Semantic Web technologies to enhance AOI.

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[26] M. Gudgin, N. Mendelsohn, M. Nottingham, and H. Ruellan, "SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism," , 2005.

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[28] MSDN, "Data-Pull Model vs. Data-Push Model," , 2005.

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