Multimedia Web Ontology Language

Machine interpretation of documents and services in Semantic Web environment is primarily enabled by (a) the capability to mark documents, document segments and services with semantic tags and (b) the ability to establish contextual relations between the tags with a domain model, which is formally represented as ontology. Human beings use natural languages to communicate an abstract view of the world. Natural language constructs are symbolic representations of human experience and are close to the conceptual model that Semantic Web technologies deal with. Thus, natural language constructs have been naturally used to represent the ontology elements. This makes it convenient to apply Semantic Web technologies in the domain of textual information. In contrast, multimedia documents are perceptual recording of human experience. An attempt to use a conceptual model to interpret the perceptual records gets severely impaired by the semantic gap that exists between the perceptual media features and the conceptual world. Notably, the concepts have their roots in perceptual experience of human beings and the apparent disconnect between the conceptual and the perceptual world is rather artificial. The key to semantic processing of multimedia data lies in harmonizing the seemingly isolated conceptual and the perceptual worlds. Representation of the Domain knowledge needs to be extended to enable perceptual modeling, over and above conceptual modeling that is supported. The perceptual model of a domain primarily comprises observable media properties of the concepts. Such perceptual models are useful for semantic interpretation of media documents, just as the conceptual models help in the semantic interpretation of textual documents.