WebStore - A Web-based Secure Multimedia Document Store
by Thomas Gringel
Telecommunication services are becoming more and more data intensive
in several areas such as network control, network management,
billing services, traffic analysis, service management, service
marketing, customer care and fraud detection. For several of these
applications, fast access and secure data storage over a longer
period of time is crucial. Given the increasing amount of network
traffic, registering and retrieving of these data requires very
large databases in the order of TeraBytes.
One project at GMD Institute for Open Communicatin Systems is
designing a managed Web-based secure multimedia document store,
called WebStore. A file system based version has been developed
in the ACTS Project Prospect in 1998. An improved will be finished
in the near future which will be based on current TINA (Telecommunication
Information Networking Architecture) service access and service
management specifications. The WebStore potentially provides the
necessary features to become a commercial service in the evolving
pan-European Open Service Market (OSM) environment and could be
used to demonstrate a set of business processes to be automated
in such environments. It is intended to use the WebStore as a
service being provided by a 3rd party provider in context of the
TINA business model.
The WebStore service will be used to demonstrate scenarios for
the automation of business processes between service providers,
network operators and customers. This includes management services
such as Order Handling (Subscription), Off- and On-line Service
Configuration, Service Instantiation (via service factory), as
well as QoS Management, Problem Handling (TTS), Invoicing/Collection
(Accounting/ Payment). To overcome today’s shortcomings of Internet/Web
based services, ie no guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for
multimedia services, insufficient security, service monitoring
and control, customer care, etc. The required security and management
functions are being developed based on ODP (Open Distributed Processing),
NMF (Network Management Forum) and TINA concepts.
The WebStore utilises existing and forthcoming database technology,
predominantly Oracle database and management software. It is planed
to use the Oracle 8 Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)
for persistency of management data as well as for the storeage
and retrieval of documents up to the size of 4 Gigabyte.
Future Activities
It is planed to use the Oracle Application Server 4.0 as middleware
platform to combine Oracle’s ideas of Network Computing Architecture
(NCA) with concepts of the TINA service architecture and the distributed
processing environment (DPE). This middleware technology offers
a large scalability using ‘Cartridges’ which can be plugged within
the Oracle environment. The access to these cartridges is provided
via both HTTP- and CORBA 2.0/IIOP-Interfaces.
Please contact:
Thomas Gringel - GMD
Tel: +49 30 3463 7166
E-mail: gringel@fokus.gmd.de
