A multimedia user preference model that supports semantics and its application to MPEG 7/21

Semantic interoperability is usually provided in open environments through standards and domain ontology. The dominant standards for multimedia content and service descriptions are MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. The MPEG-7 semantic DS has powerful semantic description capabilities and supports using semantic entities specified in domain ontology in multimedia content descriptions. However, the MPEG-7/21 usage environment allows neither the specification of semantic user preferences nor the exploitation of domain knowledge and MPEG-7 semantic metadata descriptions. In addition, the users cannot explicitly specify, in the hierarchical MPEG-7/21 filtering and search preferences, the Boolean operators that should be used during content filtering to combine the hierarchy components. We think these as serious limitations and we propose a hierarchical semantic user preference model that allows for the explicit specification of Boolean operators. Then, we present the application of the model in MPEG-7/21 and the model implementation within the DS-MIRF framework