A Conceptual Model for Publishing Multimedia Content on the Semantic Web

Retrieving multimedia remains a challenge on the Web of the 21st century. This is due, among other things, to the inherent limitations of machine-driven multimedia understanding, limitations which equally hold on the Web 2.0 or on its semantic counterpart. Describing multimedia resources through metadata is thus often seen as the only viable way to enable efficient multimedia retrieval. Assuming the availability of metadata descriptions, effectively indexing multimedia requires mediating among the wide range of metadata formats presently used to annotate or describe these resources. Semantic technologies have been identified as a potential solution for this large-scale interoperability problem. The work presented in this paper builds upon this last statement. We introduce RICO, a conceptual model and a set of ontologies to mark up multimedia content embedded in Web pages and to deploy such multimedia descriptions on the Semantic Web. By using semantic metadata referencing formal ontologies, we not only provide a basis for the uniform description of multimedia resources on the Web, but also enable automatic mediation between metadata standards, and intelligent multimedia retrieval features.