Multimedia tagging: past, present and future

The tags have proved to be a very crucial mechanism to facilitate the effective sharing and organization of large scale of multimedia information. As a result, technical developments on intelligent multimedia tagging have attracted a substantial amount of efforts involving experts from information retrieval, multimedia computing and artificial intelligence (particularly computer vision). The truly interdisciplinary research has resulted in many algorithmic and methodological developments. Meanwhile, many commercial web systems (e.g., Youtube, Last.fm and Flickr) have successfully introduced a variety of toolkits to assist different users in discovering and exploring media content using tags. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive coverage on the evolution of research for developing multimedia tagging technologies and identify a range of major challenges for the further scholarly study in the coming years.