A Flexible Architecture for Semantic Annotation and Automated Multimedia Presentation Generation

Multimedia information system design has been recently influenced by state-of-the-art technologies such as those provided by semantic web. This paper introduces an information search and retrieval methodology that employs semantic web technologies for its data representation and reasoning tasks. Creating a meaningful multimedia presentation is an attempt to answer a user’s query using a knowledge representation structure. In this case, the system instead of providing a list of results, as happens in many typical information search and retrieval systems, collects a list of selected items based on the relevancy to the queried topic and also meaningful relationships between data objects. The collected information is used for the construction of an automated presentation to demonstrate the results to the user. The paper concentrates in particular on the content selection, narration structuring, and presentation design and generation processes. The implementation of an automatic presentation generation facility in an integrated system, called MANA, is described through the paper. MANA is designed to generate adaptive and automatic presentations based on users’ perspectives and preferences on the queried topic.