Enabling access to Linked Media with SPARQL-MM

The amount of audio, video and image data on the web is immensely growing, which leads to data management problems based on the hidden character of multimedia. Therefore the interlinking of semantic concepts and media data with the aim to bridge the gap between the document web and the Web of Data has become a common practice and is known as Linked Media. However, the value of connecting media to its semantic meta data is limited due to lacking access methods specialized for media assets and fragments as well as to the variety of used description models. With SPARQL-MM we extend SPARQL, the standard query language for the Semantic Web with media specific concepts and functions to unify the access to Linked Media. In this paper we describe the motivation for SPARQL-MM, present the State of the Art of Linked Media description formats and Multimedia query languages, and outline the specification and implementation of the SPARQL-MM function set.