Ontologies for Multimedia Annotation: An overview

In recent years, along with the expansion of Web 2.0 and social networks, an extreme growth of multimedia content on the Web is registered. That multimedia content is mostly in the form of images and videos. To enable enhanced use, reuse and retrieval of multimedia content from the Web, that content needs to be annotated. Several multimedia metadata standards and a number of vocabularies commonly used for annotating multimedia content exist today. Semantic Web technologies, like RDF and ontologies, provide welldefined meaning for the multimedia content, enabling better processing of their annotations by computers and applications. Formal language OWL, along with its sublanguages, is used for defining ontologies on the Semantic Web. In this paper a brief overview of ontologies in general and selected specialized multimedia ontologies that can be used for semantically rich multimedia annotation is presented. Key-Words: ontology, metadata, Semantic Web, OWL, semantic annotation, multimedia ontologies