Ontology-Driven Interoperability for MPEG-7

Research efforts for interoperability support in the multimedia domain are presented here. Interoperability, both at the syntactic and the semantic level, is necessary in the open multimedia consumption environment formed in the Internet today, so that the multimedia content services offered by different vendors may interoperate. Syntactic interoperability support is achieved in the multimedia domain through the adoption of the dominant MPEG-7 standard for multimedia content and service description. Domain knowledge is then integrated, in the form of domain ontologies, in the MPEG-7 constructs, in order to achieve semantic interoperability. Finally, the utilization of the interoperability support in real world applications is discussed.