Semantic User Preference Descriptions in MPEG-7/21

Standards and domain ontologies are very important for providing semantic interoperability and information access in open environments. The MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are the dominant efforts for the description of multimedia content and multimedia content services. The MPEG-7 Semantic DS has been shown to have powerful semantic description capabilities, which can utilize complex concepts, relationships and individuals specified in domain ontologies in multimedia content descriptions. However, the MPEG-7/21 Usage Environment does not provide concrete methodologies for expressing semantic user preferences and exploiting the domain knowledge and the MPEG-7 semantic metadata descriptions that may exist. We believe that this is a serious limitation and we propose a concrete methodology as well as model and language capabilities for integrating semantic user preference descriptions within the MPEG-7/21 standard. The proposed approach preserves the hierarchical structure of the current MPEG-7/21 user preference descriptions, which are a special case of the proposed ones. We also present the implementation of the model within the DS-MIRF framework, which allows descriptions of domain ontologies, semantic content descriptions and user preference descriptions in an OWL/RDF environment and automatic conversion to MPEG-7/21 descriptors.