Caliph & Emir: Semantics in Multimedia Retrieval and Annotation

As shown by recent studies it is estimated that there will be nearly 300 million digital image capture devices in use worldwide through 2004, capturing about 29 billion digital pictures, most of which will be organised in some kind of multimedia repository and available via the World Wide Web or through some other means of sharing data [Infotrend, 04]. Many of these images need to be stored, sorted and retrieved by using personal digital library applications. MPEG-7 offers a range of standardized description methods for generating metadata for multimedia content and allows ontology-like semantic descriptions. Caliph & Emir is a pair of applications that use MPEG-7 for annotation and search of digital photos focusing on semantic descriptions.