Personal content management system: A semantic approach

The amount of multimedia resources that is created and needs to be managed is increasing considerably. Additionally, a significant increase of metadata, either structured (metadata fields of standardized metadata formats) or unstructured (free tagging or annotations) is noticed. This increasing amount of data and metadata, combined with the substantial diversity in terms of used metadata fields and constructs, results in severe problems to manage and retrieve these multimedia resources. Standardized metadata schemes can be used but the plethora of these schemes results in interoperability issues. In this paper, we propose a metadata model suited for personal content management systems. We create a layered metadata service that implements the presented model as an upper layer and combines different metadata schemes in the lower layers. Semantic web technologies are used to define and link formal representations of these schemes. Specifically, we create an ontology for the DIG35 metadata standard and elaborate on how it is used within this metadata service. To illustrate the service, we present a representative use case scenario consisting of the upload, annotation, and retrieval of multimedia content within a personal content management system.