Integration of OWL Ontologies in MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime Compliant Semantic Indexing

We describe a systematic methodology for extending the audiovisual content description standards (MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime) with domain-specific knowledge descriptions expressed in OWL. The domain-specific descriptions of the audiovisual content metadata are completely transparent to applications and tools that use MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime, allowing them to use the domainspecific ontologies without any software changes. We also present an interoperability mechanism between OWL and the audiovisual content description standards, which allows MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime descriptions and their domain-specific extensions to be described in OWL and vice versa. Thus, the methodology and the mechanisms presented here open up opportunities for reusing ontology tools and ontologies across a large number of applications (with or without audiovisual content) and across different professional and user communities. We present the details of the methodology and the implementation of the tools supporting it as well as its integration in a large framework for domain-specific indexing and retrieval of audiovisual content.