Affiliations: Tata Consultancy Services, Plot No. 249 D&E, Udyog Vihar Phase IV, Gurgaon – 122 016, India | Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur – 721 302, India | Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi – 110 016, India
Abstract: This paper presents a new approach to build distributed digital libraries with multimedia contents. The authors propose a new scheme for media feature based concept modelling to address the limitation of traditional ontology based multimedia retrieval systems. The perceptual models can be used for semantic query processing using standard MPEG-7 media content descriptions. The authors have defined a new ontology language M-OWL (multimedia web ontology language) to support this perceptual modelling. M-OWL is an extension to the OWL (web ontology language) with new constructs for formal representation of the media properties of the domain concepts. It supports probabilistic evidential reasoning for robust concept recognition in multimedia documents. The separation of perceptual modelling of concepts from the repository architecture enables seamless integration of diverse multimedia contents. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is used to integrate large number of distributed information sources, each of which is modelled as an intelligent information agent. The authors have demonstrated the capability of the architecture by building a few research prototypes, namely a virtual encyclopaedia of Indian culture, a document image repository and a multimedia portal.