Knowledge web: realising the semantic web... all the way to knowledge-enhanced multimedia documents

The semantic web and semantic web services are major efforts in order to spread and to integrate knowledge technology to the whole web. The Knowledge Web network of excellence aims at supporting their developments at the best and largest European level and supporting industry in adopting them. It especially investigates the solution of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamics obstacles to the full development of the semantic web. We explain how Knowledge Web results should benefit knowledge-enhanced multimedia applications

Living with the Semantic Gap: Experiences and remedies in the context of medical imaging

Semantic annotation of images is a key concern for the newly emerged applications of semantic multimedia. Machine processable descriptions of images make it possible to automate a variety of tasks from search and discovery to composition and collage of image data bases. However, the ever occurring problem of the semantic gap between the low level descriptors and the high level interpretation of an image poses new challenges and needs to be addressed before the full potential of semantic multimedia can be realised. We explore the possibilities and lessons learnt with applied semantic multimedia from our engagement with medical imaging where we deployed ontologies and a novel distributed architecture to provide semantic annotation, decision support and methods for tackling the semantic gap problem

Modelling data intensive web sites with OntoWeaver

This paper illustrates the OntoWeaver modelling approach, which relies on a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model all aspects of data intensive web sites and thus offers high level support for the design and development of data-intensive web sites. In particular, the OntoWeaver site ontologies comprise two components: a site view ontology and a presentation ontology. The site view ontology provides meta-models to allow for the composition of sophisticated site views, which allow end users to navigate and manipulate the underlying domain databases. The presentation ontology abstracts the look and feel for site views and makes it possible for the visual appearance and layout to be specified at a high level of abstractio

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application