Semantic Web Techniques Application for Video Fragment Annotation and Management

The amount of videos loaded every day on the web is constantly growing and in a close future videos will constitute the primary Web content. However, video resources are currently handled only through the use of plugins and result therefore scarcely integrated on the World Wide Web. Standards as HTML 5 and Media Fragment URI, actually under development, promise to enhance video accessibility and to allow a more effective management of video fragments. On the other hand, the need for annotating digital objects, possibly at a low granularity level, is being highlighted in various scientific communities. User created annotation, if properly structured and machine processable, can enrich web content and enhance search and browsing capabilities. Providing full support for video fragments tagging, linking, annotation and retrieval represents therefore a key-factor for the development of a new generation of Web applications. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of Semantic Web techniques in this scenario and introduce a novel Web application for semantic multimodal video fragment annotation and management that we are currently developing.