CROEQS: Contemporaneous Role Ontology-based Expanded Query Search - Implementation and Evaluation

Searching annotated items in multimedia databases becomes increasingly important. The traditional approach is to build a search engine based on textual metadata. However, in manually annotated multimedia databases, the conceptual level of what is searched for might differ from the high-levelness of the annotations of the items. To address this problem, we present CROEQS, a semantically enhanced search engine. It allows the user to query the annotated persons not only on their name, but also on their roles at the time the multimedia item was broadcast. We also present the ontology used to expand such queries: it allows us to semantically represent the domain knowledge on people fulfilling a role during a temporal interval in general, and politicians holding a political office specifically. The evaluation results show that query expansion using data retrieved from an ontology considerably filters the result set, although there is a performance penalty.