Semantic representation of multimedia content

Multimedia documents constitute extremely rich information resources, whose efficacious management is intertwined with the effective capturing of the underlying semantics. The conveyed meaning may span along multiple levels and relates to search and retrieval tasks, much as to the very extraction and interpretation of content descriptions. In this chapter we consider the formal representation of multimedia semantics that pertain to media and domain specific descriptions, for the purpose of supporting both the extraction and subsequent semantic management of such descriptions. To this end, firstly, we present first an overview of existing approaches to the representation of multimedia content and discuss open issues. Subsequently, we present the ontology infrastructure developed in the context of the BOEMIE project tailored towards the formal representation of multimedia content. Concluding, we present what can non-standard formal representation technologies, such as fuzzy knowledge representation formalisms bring to multimedia document processing and management.