A platform for contextual multimedia data: towards a unified metadata model and querying

Whereas the former Web mostly consisted of information represented in textual documents, nowadays the Web includes a huge number of multimedia documents like videos, photos, and audio. This enormous increase in volume in the private, and above all in the industry sector, makes it more and more difficult to find relevant information. Besides the pure management of multimedia documents, finding hidden semantics and interconnections of heterogeneous cross-media content is a crucial task and stays mostly untouched. To overcome this tendency we see the need for a generic cross-media analysis platform, ranging from extracting relevant features from media objects over representing and publishing extraction results to integrated querying of aggregated findings. In this paper we propose the underlying foundation for a common and contextual multimedia platform in terms of an unified model for publishing multimedia analysis results. The proposed model is based on existing ontologies, adapted and extended to the cross-media environment. Besides the introduction of the already mentioned platform and model, this paper also briefly introduces specific use-case applications as well as possibilities to query the persisted data.