Multimedia Semantic Annotation Propagation

Scientific research is producing and consuming large volumes of multimedia data at an ever growing rate. Annotations to the data helps associating context and enhances content management, making it easier to interpret and share data. However, raw data often needs to go through complex processing steps before it can be consumed. During these transformation processes, original annotations from the production phase are often discarded or ignored, since their usefulness is usually limited to the first transformation step. New annotations must be associated with the final product, a time consuming task often carried out manually. Systematically associating new annotations to the result of each data transformation step is known as annotation propagation. This paper introduces techniques for structuring annotations by applying references to ontologies and automatically transforming these annotations along with data transformation processes. This helps the construction of new annotated multimedia data sets, preserving contextual information. The solution is based on: (i) the notion of semantic annotations; and (ii) a set of transformations rules, based on ontological relations.