Retrieval of MPEG-7 based Semantic Descriptions

With the growing amount of people using the Internet, and creating digital content and information, knowledge retrieval becomes a critical task. Knowledge retrieval allows people to find content they search for when they need it. Ongoing efforts provide frameworks and standards for annotating digital and non-digital content semantically to describe resources more precisely and processable in comparison to simple descriptive structured and unstructured metadata. One example for a framework for semantic annotations is MPEG-7. But although the MPEG group provides with MPEG-7 a useful and well defined theoretical framework for the creation of semantic annotation, retrieval of the annotations is not discussed. In this paper the authors present a retrieval process for MPEG-7 based semantic annotations founded on well proved information retrieval techniques, namely query expansion and regular expressions. Additionally a prototype implementation extending an existing MPEG-7 retrieval application will be presented.