Multimedia Semantics XG Proposal


Confirmed Participants

IVML-NTUA
CWI
University of Aberdeen
University of Maryland
DFKI


Expressed interest (to be confirmed)

Apple
Hewlett Packard
France Telecom
British Telecom
University of Oxford
Adobe
Yahoo
IBM



Objectives and Scope

Lately, there is a growing interest for the publication of multimedia
content in the web. Several organisations, from museums and
archives to TV channels, private companies, personal users publish on the
web images, videos, music etc (maybe some links).
On the other hand, the life-cycle of multimedia documents contains several processes
like pre-production, production, post-production, processing,
archiving, search and retrieval, browsing, delivery, presentation,
navigation, posting etc, that usually produce a set of metadata
either manually, semi-automatically or automatically.
The above metadata could be divided in three categories, namely administrative,
structural and descriptive. Administrative metadata provide information
that is necessary for management and processing of the information
(for example type of image, duration of video, usage history, creator
etc). Structural metadata are used by processes like navigation and
presentation that need information like the number of scenes in a video
or the regions and the objects of an image etc. Finally, descriptive metadata
provide all the information that describes the content of the multimedia
document.
Several standardisation efforts tried to provide formats for the above
metadata, covering different types of providers, users, processes and
of metadata categories (references like MPEG-7, VRA, microformats etc).
Unfortunately, the users are confused from all the above technologies
and standards and consequently the multimedia content in the web usually is not
annotated and thus the web services concerning multimedia content are rather limited.

In the above framework, the main objectives of the Multimedia Semantics XG
proposal has as follows:
1. Provide a formal, still easily understandable (for providers, implementors and
end users) view of the standardisation efforts in the area of multimedia
2. Provide best practices for annotating and using multimedia content on the web,
after classifying the users, the type of content, the type of metadata that
they want to provide etc.
3. Discover the connection of the above technologies with the Semantic Web
ones, in order to provide a more semantic view of metadata formats and standards.