We present an ontology for intertextual studies, which is embedded in a multimedia authoring environment. In addition, we describe the attendant technical infrastructure. The knowledge-enhanced authoring tool allows cultural experts to specify intertextual relationships between works of art which may be represented in different media such as text, audio, image, or moving pictures. The result of the authoring process is a multimedia document with ontological markup. Intertextual cultural threads are thus, encoded in multimedia documents that can be viewed in browser environments supporting EMMOs (Enhanced Multimedia Meta Objects).

Cultural institutions and museums have realized that annotations contribute valuable metadata for search and retrieval, which in turn can increase the visibility of the digital items they expose via their digital library systems. By exploiting annotations created by others, visitors can discover content they would not have found otherwise, which implies that annotations must be accessible and processable for humans and machines. Currently, however, there exists no widely adopted annotation standard that goes beyond specific media types. Most institutions build their own in-house annotation solution and employ proprietary annotation models, which are not interoperable with those of other systems. As a result, annotation data are usually stored in closed data silos and visible and processable only within the scope of a certain annotation system. As the main contribution of this paper, we present the LEMO Annotation Framework. It (1) provides a uniform annotation model for multimedia contents and various types of annotations, (2) can address fragments of various content-types in a uniform, interoperable manner and (3) pulls annotations out of closed data silos and makes them available as interoperable, dereferencable Web resources. With the LEMO Annotation Framework annotations become part of the Web and can be processed, linked, and referenced by other services. This in turn leads to even higher visibility and increases the potential value of annotations.

Cultural institutions and museums have realized that annotations contribute valuable metadata for search and retrieval, which in turn can increase the visibility of the digital items they expose via their digital library systems. By exploiting annotations created by others, visitors can discover content they wouldn’t have found otherwise, which implies that annotations must be accessible and processable for humans and machines. Currently, however, there exists no widely adopted annotation standard that goes beyond specific media types. Most institutions build their own in-house annotation solution and employ proprietary annotation models, which are not interoperable with those of other systems. As a result, annotation data are usually stored in closed data silos and visible and processable only within the scope of a certain annotation system. As the main contribution of this paper, we present the LEMO Annotation Framework. It (i) provides a uniform annotation model for multimedia contents and various types of annotations, (ii) can address fragments of various content-types in a uniform, interoperable manner, and (iii) pulls annotations out of closed data silos and makes them available as interoperable, dereferencable Web resources. With the LEMO Annotation Framework annotations become part of the Web and can be processed, linked, and referenced by other services. This in turn leads to even higher visibility and increases the potential value of annotations.

Digital Libraries are currently discovering the full potential of web technologies in conjunction with building rich user communities and retaining customers. A visit to a digital library should nowadays offer more than passive consumption of content. Both the library and the user can benefit from moving forward from the "content provider" vs. "consumer" paradigm to the "prosumer" paradigm, thus allowing the user to produce and actively contribute content, interact with content and be part of communities of interest. We are presenting a smart annotation tool developed as part of the 'Living Memory' applications in the context of the EU-project BRICKS that supports the prosumer approach by inviting users to contribute new information by annotating content or commenting other annotations, thereby creating new knowledge in a collaborative way.

Current semantic approaches to multimedia content modeling treat the content’s media, the semantic description of the content, and the functionality performed on the content such as rendering as separate entities, usually kept on separate servers in separate files or databases and typically under the control of different authorities. This separation of content from its description and functionality hinders the exchange and sharing of content in collaborative multimedia application scenarios. In this chapter, we propose Enhanced Multimedia Meta Objects (Emmos) as a new content modeling formalism that combines multimedia content with its description and functionality. Emmos can be serialized and exchanged in their entirety covering media, description, and functionality and are versionable, thereby establishing a suitable foundation for collaborative multimedia applications. We outline a distributed infrastructure for Emmo management and illustrate the benefits and usefulness of Emmos and this infrastructure by means of two practical applications.

It is the aim of the CULTOS project to provide researchers in intertextual studies with a collaborative multimedia platform for the authoring, management, search, exchange, and presentation of Intertextual Threads (ITTs), knowledge structures that interrelate and compare cultural artefacts. By means of the CULTOS platform, researchers will be able to create a world-wide collection of multimedia-enhanced ITTs comparing cultural artefacts from different personal and cultural backgrounds. This constitutes a valuable contribution for comparative studies and cultural heritage. In this paper, we propose and formally define Enhanced Multimedia Meta Objects (Emmos) as a new means for representing multimedia content. Emmos are unique in that they combine three different aspects of multimedia content: the individual media objects making up the content, semantic relationships between those media objects, and functionality on the content. With Emmos, we obtain an adequate means for the representation of multimedia-enriched ITTs as the foundation for the worldwide distributed collection of ITTs envisioned by CULTOS.