Harvesting Intelligence in Multimedia Social Tagging Systems

As more people adopt tagging practices, social tagging systems tend to form rich knowledge repositories that enable the extraction of patterns reflecting the way content semantics is perceived by the web users. This is of particular importance, especially in the case of multimedia content, since the availability of such content in the web is very high and its efficient retrieval using textual annotations or content-based automatically extracted metadata still remains a challenge. It is argued that complementing multimedia analysis techniques with knowledge drawn from web social annotations may facilitate multimedia content management. This chapter focuses on analyzing tagging patterns and combining them with content feature extraction methods, generating, thus, intelligence from multimedia social tagging systems. Emphasis is placed on using all available “tracks” of knowledge, that is tag co-occurrence together with semantic relations among tags and low-level features of the content. Towards this direction, a survey on the theoretical background and the adopted practices for analysis of multimedia social content are presented. A case study from Flickr illustrates the efficiency of the proposed approach. Eirini Giannakidou Informatics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, e-mail: [email protected] Informatics & Telematics Institute, CERTH, Thermi Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] Foteini Kaklidou Informatics & Telematics Institute, CERTH, Thermi Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] Elisavet Chatzilari Informatics & Telematics Institute, CERTH, Thermi Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] Ioannis Kompatsiaris Informatics & Telematics Institute, CERTH, Thermi Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] Athena Vakali Informatics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, e-mail: [email protected]