MOWL: An Ontology Representation Language for Web-Based Multimedia Applications

Several multimedia applications need to reason with concepts and their media properties in specific domain contexts. Media properties of concepts exhibit some unique characteristics that cannot be dealt with conceptual modeling schemes followed in the existing ontology representation and reasoning schemes. We have proposed a new perceptual modeling technique for reasoning with media properties observed in multimedia instances and the latent concepts. Our knowledge representation scheme uses a causal model of the world where concepts manifest in media properties with uncertainties. We introduce a probabilistic reasoning scheme for belief propagation across domain concepts through observation of media properties. In order to support the perceptual modeling and reasoning paradigm, we propose a new ontology language, Multimedia Web Ontology Language (MOWL). Our primary contribution in this article is to establish the need for the new ontology language and to introduce the semantics of its novel language constructs. We establish the generality of our approach with two disperate knowledge-intensive applications involving reasoning with media properties of concepts. Categories and Subject Descriptors: F.4.1 [Mathematical Logic and Formal Languages]: Mathematical Logic; H.2.4 [Database Management]: Systems-Multimedia databases; H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia Information Systems; I.2.4 [Artificial Intelligence]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods-Representation languages