Legal Multimedia Management and Semantic Annotation for Improved Search and Retrieval

In this work, we study the possibilities of multimedia management and automatic annotation focused on legal domain. In this field, professionals are used to consume the most part of their time searching and retrieving legal information. For instance, in scenarios as ediscovery and e-learning search and retrieval of the multimedia contents are the basis of the whole applications. In addition, the legal multimedia explosion increases the need of store these files in a structured form to facilitate the access to this information in an efficient and effective way. Furthermore, the improvements achieved by sensors and video recorders in the last years increase the size of these files, producing an enormous demand of storage capability. JPEG2000 and MPEG-7 are international standards by the ISO/IEC organization that allow to reduce, in some degrees, the amount of data needed to store these files. These standards also permit to include the semantic annotation in the considered file formats, and to access to this information without the need to decompress the contained video or image. How to obtain the semantic information from multimedia is also studied as well as the different techniques to exploit and combine this information.