A virtual stone soup: letter from the editors
Luís Veiga, Fábio Kon, Gordon S. Blair · Journal of Internet Services and Applications · 2012
This issue of the Journal of Internet Services and Applications features six papers covering the fields of Cloud/Grid/ Autonomic Computing, Recommendation Systems, Web Services, and Security.It is released when the greatest media event on Earth has just taken place: the Olympic Games of London 2012.The experience of The Games has been made more pervasive, in-depth, and personalized as never before with fans being able to follow their favorite sports on a multitude of hand-held devices, either live or asynchronously.An unprecedented computing infrastructure has been set up to produce and deliver, via Internet, content (schedules, news, records and result history, athlete profiles) and live feeds of most events, even those that are not to be broadcasted by any TV station.Cloud computing and cloud-enabled technologies were used for capturing, storing, editing, and enhancing content, such as projected flags on tracks and swimming pools, lines highlighting record marks in pools and sandboxes for track and field events.Encoding and streaming live and on-demand has required massive computation, storage, and network deployment.But, besides the sheer scale of equipment and deployment, there are also challenges and opportunities related to data handling and processing, as well as application integration.We thus see that this intensive use of computerrelated technologies and, in particular, of Internet-related