Ontologies

In the aceMedia framework, ontologies constitute an integrral part in the multimedia content management chain, supporting content analysis, annotation, access & retrieval at the semantic level. The developed ontology infrastructure is in RDFS and follows a modular scheme which is illustrated below.

A light version of DOLCE serves as the core ontology, providing attachments points for the more specific domain and multimedia ontologies.

The Multimedia Ontologies address the representation of media related aspects of multimedia content, including structural and low-level features information. The former addresses decomposition of content in space and time, and the respective spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal relations that characterize the content segments, while the latter includes descriptors addressing colour, texture, localisation, etc. The engineering of the Multimedia Ontologies follows the MPEG-7 specifications (Part 5–Multimedia Description Scheme and Part 3–Visual).

The Domain Ontologies provide the domain specific conceptualisations that specify the vocabulary and semantics of the descriptions used to analyse and annotate the multimedia content. In the context of aceMedia these include four holidays domains (beach, camping, trekking, skiing) and two sports related (tennis, motorsport). Entities shared across the different domains are included in a separate ontology (the Midlevel one).

The linking between the domain and multimedia ontologies is performed through the Annotation Ontology, which additionally allows one to accosiate a degree of confidence to the extracted annotations.

The complete set of ontologies can be downloaded here.

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