Multimedia Metadata Ontology (M3O)

Abstract 

Existing metadata models and metadata standards are not sufficient to describe the semantics of rich, structured multimedia content in formats such as SMIL, SVG, and Flash. They are either conceptually too narrow, focus on a specific media type only, cannot be used and combined together, or are not practically applicable. This hampers the retrieval of such presentations by search engines today and makes their archival and management a difficult task. Existing W3C standards for rich multimedia presentations like SMIL and SVG foresee the use of the Resource Description Framework to describe the semantics of the multimedia content. However, until today there is no appropriate metadata model or best practice available that explains how to describe and annotate rich, structured multimedia content. To fill this gap, we have developed the Multimedia Metadata Ontology (M3O) for annotating rich, structured multimedia presentations. The M3O provides a generic modeling framework for representing sophisticated multimedia metadata. It allows for integrating the features provided by the existing metadata models and metadata standards. With the M3O, we make the semantics of rich multimedia presentations machine-readable and machine-understandable. The M3O is used with our SemanticMM4U framework for the multi-channel generation of semantically-rich multimedia presentations. 

M3O Wiki

Current and ongoing work around the M3O is documented in our wiki:

http://semantic-multimedia.org/index.php/M3O:Main

Ontology

The Multimedia Metadata Ontology is available here (Version 2010/02/28): 

• Annotation pattern
• Decomposition pattern
• Collection pattern
• Provenance pattern

Implemenation

There is a Java API under development. It is released under open source license and can be obtained from: https://launchpad.net/m3o

Publications

C. Saathoff and A. Scherp, Unlocking the Semantics of Multimedia Presentations in the Web with the Multimedia Metadata Ontology, World Wide Web Conference, April 2010.

Project

WeKnowIt, http://www.weknowit.eu/