A Web Services Orchestration Solution for Semantic Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval

In this article we are presenting a solution for the problem of combining various indexation algorithms in order to acquire a semantic multimedia indexation and to provide responses to the user complex queries. The challenge of this problem concerns the big heterogeneity of the multimedia indexation algorithms and the weak semantic aspect they address. Our solution considers a generic interface for the indexation algorithms, an implementation as Web services, as well as a semantic description in terms of WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology) of their functionality and orchestration. Original contribution of the article concerns the idea of organizing the various multimedia metadata types into a generic structure, used to express the user queries, the algorithms' generic interface, as well as the algorithms' WSMO metadata. This approach facilitates the definition of algorithm combination rules, and enables the reduction of the multimedia retrieval task to a metadata matching process.