Coupling OWL with MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime for Domain-specific Multimedia Information Integration and Retrieval

The success of the Web is due to a large extent in the development of standards that allow interoperability in open environments. Future work in the field will have greater impact if it is based and built on existing standards. Well-accepted international standards for multimedia content descriptions are MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime. However, these standards do not propose a concrete methodology and language for the integration of domainspecific knowledge for the multimedia content. Moreover, domain-specific knowledge for a specific domain related to the content of a video may be described in a well-accepted ontology description language such as OWL, which is independent of MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime. We describe a methodology that allows the coupling of OWL with MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime, so that first, domain-specific knowledge is transparently integrated into MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime thus enhancing multimedia retrieval performance and second, multimedia content and domain-specific information described in OWL is mapped into MPEG-7 and TV-Anytime and vice versa. The methodology greatly facilitates information integration, retrieval and interoperability in Web application environments. We also describe an MPEG-7 compatible Retrieval API that has been developed for expressing powerful retrieval queries on multimedia content utilizing domain-specific knowledge and application specific metadata knowledge.