A Logic Based Approach for the Multimedia Data Representation and Retrieval

Nowadays, the amount of multimedia data is increasingrapidly, and hence, there is an increasing need for efficientmethods to manage the multimedia content. This paper proposesa framework for the description and retrieval of multimediadata. The data are represented at both the syntactic(structure, metadata and low level features) and semantic(the meaning of the data) levels. We use the MPEG-7 standard,which provides a set of tools to describe multimediacontent from different viewpoints, to represent the syntacticlevel. However, due to its XML Schema based representation,MPEG-7 is not suitable to represent the semanticaspect of the data in a formal and concise way. Moreover,inferential mechanisms are not provided. To alleviate theselimitations, we propose to extend MPEG-7 with a domainontology, formalized using a logical formalism. Then, thesemantic aspect of the data is described using the ontology’svocabulary, as a set of logical expressions. We enhancethe ontology by a rules layer, to describe more complexconstraints between domain concepts and relations.User’s queries may concern the syntactic and/or semanticfeatures. The syntactic constraints are expressed usingXQuery language and evaluated using an XML query engine;whereas the semantic query constraints are expressedusing a rules language and evaluated using a specific resolutionmechanism.