Semantic Metadata Instantiation and Consolidation within an Ontology-based Multimedia Document Management System

Abstract. Automated modeling of appropriate and valid document,de- scriptions is a central issue for the benet,and success of an ontology- based personal document,management,system. One of the more practi- cal problems is the deduction of knowledge from partly large but vary- ing, ambiguous, or domain specic information sources (metadata, at- tributes, features, etc.). The generation process, which requires transfor- mation and reasoning techniques, primarily depends on the application context and should be customized accordingly. Furthermore, automati- cally generated and deduced information needs appropriate cleaning and consolidation to maintain a certain level of data quality. Therefore, this paper presents a stepwise knowledge modeling approach based on consec- utive stages and separated, congurable rule sets. Following the principle of divide-and-conquer, the suggested approach separately addresses the problems of general translation of diverse information sources, syntax check, normalization, and duplication and conict handling.