Using an Ontology for Multimedia Content Semantics

In recent years, we witnessed the diffusion and rise in popularity of software platforms for the User Generated Content (UGC) management, especially multimedia objects. These platforms handle a large amount of unclassified information. UGC websites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr) do not force the users to perform classification operations and metadata definitions, leaving space to a logic of free-tags (Folksonomies). We analyzed the standards used in UGC websites for the management of the multimedia contents and their metadata. We defined an ontology to represent the semantics of these multimedia contents, so that in turn the metadata classification can give an unambiguous meaning. In order to unify metadata coming from different sources we defined all rules of mapping toward a structure defined by sources such as YouTube and Flickr. The innovation is in the approach for the formalization of web semantics for multimedia content: we used standards such as Dublin Core, Exif, IPTC and in particular the Adobe XMP standard as a starting point of this domain. With the proposed approach, once can categorize and catalog all non-standard and unclassifiable information inside the ontology, using pre-made schemas.