A Framework for Building Multimedia Ontologies from Web Information Sources

The definition of ontologies within the multimedia domain still remains a challenging task, due to the complexity of multimedia data and the related knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel framework (MOWIS) aiming at realizing a system for building Multimedia Ontologies from Web Information Sources that has been realized within the PRIN 2007-2009 project Cooperare and presented in previous works. In particular, we propose: i) a multimedia ontology model that combines both low level descriptors and high level semantic concepts; ii) automatic construction of ontologies using the FLICKR web services that provide images, tags, keywords and sometimes useful annotation describing both the image content and personal interesting information. Eventually, we describe an example of automatic ontology generation in a specific domain and present some preliminary experimental results.