A Conceptual Annotation Approach to Indexing in a Web-Based Information System

All the specialists have agreed that the possibility of adding to multimedia WWW objects some sort of ‘conceptual’ annotations describing their information content would greatly contribute to solve the problem of their ‘intelligent’ indexing and retrieval. We propose to associate with the Web objects not the final conceptual annotation, but a simple natural language (NL) caption, in the form of short texts representing a general, neutral description of their informational content. The NL caption will then be converted into a conceptual annotation in NKRL (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), making use of an automatic translation system like those we have implemented in the context of recent European projects.