Rich Semantic Media for Private and Professional Users

This report presents the current state and future development potential oftechnologies that are relevant in developing new media products and servicesbased on content that is described with semantically rich metadata. It has beenwritten within the project "Rich semantic media for private and professionalusers". The project addresses two important trends and opportunities: utilisingsemantics in media products and combining commercial media content withuser created material.The report starts with a presentation of the framework for the project anddescribes three key demonstration ideas. The demonstrations explorecombining professional and private content and how this process benefitsfrom semantic support. The main focus of the project and this report is onsemantically supported media applications but the report briefly looks at theSemantic Web status in general and what kind of semantically supportedapplications there are already currently available.The big challenge in creating semantically supported media applications iscreating the necessary infrastructure, i.e. ontologies and content withmetadata. A formal language is needed for specifying the ontology, and therethe recently approved the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is an importantstep. However, there are still only few practical applications, so it is stillunclear how well this language can meet the requirements. Query language isanother important component, and there, SPARQL Query Language for RDF,is currently being defined.Creating metadata is very laborious, if made manually. Therefore, differentway of creating metadata must be utilised: metadata may be captured as a byproduct during the production and consumption processes, it may be createdexplicitly, or may be inferenced based on the content itself. Metadata creationis not in the focus of the project, but the main principles are briefly explained.Several existing media related vocabularies are presented in the report as wellas some publicly available ontologies. There is lack of publicly availablevocabularies and ontologies, and those that exist, such as IPTC, are oftenutilised only to limited extent. The report also lists several project that dealwith related issues.