Publishing and sharing ontology-based information in a collaborative multimedia document management system

Problems which users typically experience when dealing with search and management tasks within their personal document collections mainly result from lacking expressiveness and flexibility of the traditional file systems and data models to represent individual knowledge. Ontology-based approaches provide appropriate solutions, enabling people to semantically describe their multimedia items. Furthermore, suitable techniques for the support of information sharing and exchange in ontology-based systems are still missing or only weakly supported. In this paper we present a multi-user multimedia document management system based on Semantic Web technologies. We discuss requirements and preconditions with regard to user management and access control, and describe the technical implementation of our concept.