Knowledge Representation in WERKL, an Architecture for Intelligent Multimedia Information Systems

Multimedia information systems handle vast quantities of media resources. As a consequence, it is difficult to keep track of the semantic content of these items, especially if they were produced by different users of the system. We are interested in developing a formalism and corresponding tools that will be capable of abstracting concepts, ideas, and lines of thought expressed in the media by inferring relationships between the content of different resources. The tools will emphasize the role of the system as a partner augmenting the capabilities of the human user. As such they will tackle the problems of collaboration (human-to-human, human-to-machine), knowledgesharing, and knowledge-retrieval in multimedia information systems. Users are not (indeed, cannot be) assumed to have complete knowledge of the dynamically changing content of the system; instead, they engage in an exploration of the available resources,during which they are offered opportunities to analyse their information need from different points of view.