A multimedia ontology model based on linguistic properties and audio-visual features

The exponential growth of informative contents needs intelligent information systems able to use data to create information. To aim this goal, these systems should have formal models to represent knowledge. In this way complex data can be managed and used to perform new tasks and implement innovative functionalities. This article describes a general and formal ontology model to represent knowledge using multimedia data and linguistic properties to bridge the gap between the target semantic classes and the available low-level multimedia descriptors. This model has been implemented in a system to edit, manage and share ontology in the WEB. The system provides a graphical interface to add multimedia objects by means of user interaction. The multimedia features are automatically extracted using algorithms based on MPEG-7 descriptors.