Why Real-World Multimedia Assets Fail to Enter the Semantic Web

Making multimedia assets on the one hand first-class objects on the Semantic Web, while keeping them on the other hand conforming to existing multimedia standards is a non-trivial task. Most proprietary media asset formats are binary, optimized for streaming or storage. However, the semantics carried by the media assets are not accessible directly. In addition, multimedia description standards lack the expressiveness to gain a semantic understanding of the media assets. There exists an array of requirements regarding media assets and the Semantic Web, already. Based on a critical review of these requirements we investigate how ontology languages fit into the picture. We finally analyse the usefulness of formal accounts to describe spatio-temporal aspects of multimedia assets in a practical context.