Interoperability Support between MPEG-7/21 and OWL in DS-MIRF

In this paper, we focus on interoperable semantic multimedia services that are offered in open environments such as the Internet. The use of well-accepted standards is of paramount importance for interoperability support in open environments. In addition, the semantic description of multimedia content utilizing domain ontologies is very useful for indexing, query specification, retrieval, filtering, user Interfaces, and knowledge extraction from audiovisual material. With the MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards dominating the multimedia content and service description domain and OWL dominating the ontology description languages, it is important to establish a framework that allows these standards to interoperate. We describe here the DS-MIRF framework, a software engineering framework that facilitates the development of knowledge-based multimedia applications such as multimedia information retrieval, filtering, browsing, interaction, knowledge extraction, segmentation, and content description. DS-MIRF supports interoperability of OWL with the MPEG-7/21 so that domain and application ontologies expressed in OWL can be transparently integrated with MPEG-7/21 metadata. This allows applications that recognize and use the constructs provided by MPEG-7/21 to make use of domain and application ontologies, resulting in more effective retrieval and user interaction with the audiovisual material. We also present a retrieval evaluation methodology and comparative retrieval results