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Authors: SusanneBoll

Use Case: Semantics from Multimedia Authoring

Index

1. Introduction

Authoring of personalized multimedia content can be considered as a process consisting of selecting, composing, and assembling media elements into coherent multimedia presentations that meet the user’s or user group’s preferences, interests, current situation, and environment. In the approaches we find today, media items and semantically rich metadata information are used for the selection and composition task.

For example, Mary authors a multimedia birthday book for her daughter's 18th birthday with some nice multimedia authoring tool. For this she selects images, videos and audio from her personal media store but also content which is free or she own from the Web. The selection is based of the different metadata and descriptions that come with the media such as tags, descriptions, the time stamp, the size, the location of the media item and so on. In addition to the media elements used Mary arranges them in a spatio-temporal presentation: A welcome title first and then along "multimedia chapters" sequences and groups of images interleaved by small videos. Music underlies the presentation. Mary arranges and groups, adds comments and titles, resizes media elements, brings some media to front, takes others into the back. And then, finally, there is this great birthday presentation that shows the years of her daughter's life. She presses a button, creates a Flash presentation and all the authoring semantics are gone.

2. Lost multimedia semantics

Metadata and semantics today is mainly seen on the monomedia level. Single media elements such as image, video and text are annotated and enriched with metadata by different means ranging from automatic annotation to manual tagging. In a multimedia document typically a set of media items come together and are arranged into a coherent story with a spatial and temporal layout of the time-continuous presentation, that often also allows user interaction. The authored document is more than "just" the sum of the media elements it becomes a new document with its own semantics. However, in the way we pursue multimedia authoring today, we do not care and lose the emergent sementics from multimedia authoring [1].

2.1. Multimedia authoring semantics do not "survive" the composition

So, most valuable semantics for the media elements and the resulting multimedia content that emerge with and in the authoring process are not considered any further. This means that the effort for semantically enriching media content comes to a sudden halt in the created multimedia document – which is very unfortunate. For example, for a multimedia presentation it could be very helpful if an integrated annotation tells something about the structure of the presentation, the media items and formats used, the lenght of the presentation, its degree of interactivity, the table of contents of index of the presentation, a textual summary of the content, the targeted user group and so on. Current authoring tools just use metadata to select media elements and compose them into a multimedia presentation. They do not extract and summarize the semantics that emerge from the authoring and add them to the created document for later search, retrieval and presentation support.

2.2. Multimedia content can learn from composition and media usage

For example, the media store of Mary could "learn" that some of the media items seem to be more relevant than others. Additional comments on parts of the presentation could also be new metadata entries for the media items. And also the metadata of the single media items as well as of the presentation are not added to the presentation such that is can afterwards more easier be shared, searched, managed.

3. Interoperability problems

Currently, multimedia documents do not come with a single annotation scheme. SMIL [2] comes with the most advanced modeling of annotation. Based on RDF, the head of a SMIL document allows to add an RDF description of the presentation to the structured multiemdia document and gives the author or authoring tool a space where to put the presentation's semantics. In specific domains we find annotation schemes such as LOM [3] that provide the vocabulary for annotating Learning Objects which are often Powerpoint Presentations of PDF documents but might well be multimedia presentations. AKtive Media [4] is an ontology based multimedia annotation (Images and Text) system which provides an interface for adding ontology-based, free-text and relational annotations within multimedia documents. Even though the community effort will contribute to a more or less unified set of tags, this does not ensure interoperability, search, and exchange.

4. What is needed

A semantic description of multimedia presentation should reveal the semantics of its content as well as of the composition such that a user can search, reuse, integrate multimedia presentation on the Web into his or her system. A unified semantic Web annotation scheme could then describe the thousands of Flash presentations as well as powerpoints presentation, but also SMIL and SVG presentations. For existing presentations this would give the authors a chance to annotate the presentations. For authoring tool creators this will give the chance to publish a standardized semantic presentation description with the presentation.

[1] Ansgar Scherp, Susanne Boll, Holger Cremer: Emergent Semantics in Personalized Multimedia Content, Fourth special Workshop on Multimedia Semantics, Chania, Greece, June 2006 http://www.kettering.edu/~pstanche/wms06homepage/Agenda.html.htm

[2] W3C: Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 2.0) - [Second Edition]. W3C Recommendation 07 January 2005http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-SMIL2-20050107/

[3] IEEE: IEEE 1484.12.1-2002. Draft Standard for Learning Object Metadata http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/files/LOM_1484_12_1_v1_Final_Draft.pdf

[4] AKTive Media. AKTive Media - Ontology based annotation system. http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~ajay/html/cresearch.html