Collaborative System for Semantic Annotation of Audiovisual Contents - Applications in the Context of Brazilian Independent Culture

This work presents an architecture that supports collaborative semantic annotation for audiovisual (AV) contents on the web. The main goal is to propose a semantically oriented infrastructure to organize audiovisual material produced by Brazilian points of culture and independent producers so as to optimize the searches made by community TV broadcasters, schools, film societies and internauts. The collaboration will rely on a content annotation scheme, designed to stimulate both consumers and producers to enrich the overall content description by incorporating viewpoints and meanings associated to relevant scenes, regions and objects present in the production. The proposed architecture is based on technologies for AV content description, such as MPEG-7, semantic web concepts and the Ontology Web Language (OWL). This work considers that collaborative approaches, along with the on-going efforts in expanding the coverage of Internet broadband access in Brazil, will foster the dissemination of the digital technologies in the production and recording of cultural manifestations, allowing artists and entities to publish and distribute in a more effective way their cultural patrimony over the Internet.