Multimedia Web Ontology Language

Multimedia Web Ontology Language (MOWL) has been designed to facilitate semantic interactions with multimedia contents. It supports perceptual modeling of concepts using expected media properties. While the reasoning in traditional ontology languages, e.g. Web Ontology Language (OWL), is based on Description Logics, MOWL supports a probabilistic reasoning framework based on Bayesian Network.

History

W3C forum has undertaken the initiative of standardizing the ontology representation for web-based applications. The Web Ontology Language (OWL), standardized in 2004 after maturing through XML(S), RDF(S) and DAML+OIL is a result of that effort. Ontology in OWL (and some of its predecessor languages) has been successfully used in establishing semantics of text in specific application contexts.

The concepts and properties in these traditional ontology languages are expressed as text, making an ontology readily usable for semantic analysis of textual documents. Semantic processing of media data calls for perceptual modeling of domain concepts with their media properties. Such modeling was first proposed in the Ph.D. Thesis by Hiranmay Ghosh (Electrical Engineering Department, IIT Delhi, 2002) in the form of Knowledge Description Language (KDL). With the standardization of OWL by W3C, KDL was merged with OWL to form Multimedia Web Ontology Language (MOWL). Several students have taken the work further to implement research prototypes of retrieval systems and ontology learning.

Key Features

Syntactically, MOWL is an extension of OWL. These extensions enable

• Definition of media properties following MPEG-7 media description model.
• Probabilistic association of media properties with the domain concepts.
• Formal semantics to the media properties to enable reasoning.
• Formal semantics for spatio-temporal relations across media objects and events.

MOWL is accompanied with reasoning tools that support

• Construction of model of observation for a concept in multimedia documents with expected media properties.
• Probabilistic (Bayesian) reasoning for concept recognition with the model of observation.

Bibliography

• S Chaudhury and H Ghosh. Ontology based access to heritage artefacts on the web. In Multimedia Information Extraction and Digital Heritage Preservation. Ed. B.B. Chaudhuri and U. Munshi. Springer (in press)
• H. Ghosh, G. Harit and S. Chaudhury. Using ontology for building distributed digital libraries with multimedia contents. World Digital Library, 1(2), Dec 2008, pp. 83-100.
• S. Wattamwar and H. Ghosh. Spatio-Temporal Query for Multimedia Database. Workshop on Multimedia Semantics. ACM Multimedia Conference 2008, Vancouver (Canada), October 2008
• H. Ghosh, P. Poornachandra, A. Mallik and S. Chaudhury. Learning Ontology for Personalized Video Retrieval. International Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics (WMS07), ACM Multimedia Conference, Augsberg (Germany) September 2007.
• H.Ghosh, S. Chaudhury, K. Kashyap and B. Maiti. Ontology Specification and Integration for Multimedia Applications. In Ontologies in the Context of Information Systems, Ed. R. Sharman, R. Kishore and R. Ramesh. Springer, 2007, pp. 265-296
• H.Ghosh, G. Harit and S. Chaudhury. Ontology based interaction with multimedia collections. International Conference on Digital Libraries, New Delhi, 2006.
• G. Harit, S. Chaudhury and H. Ghosh. Using Multimedia Ontology for generating conceptual annotations and hyperlinks in video collections. International conference on Web Intelligence, Hong Kong, 2006.
• T. Karthik, S. Chaudhury and H. Ghosh. Specifying Spatio-Temporal Relations in Multimedia Ontologies. International Conference of Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, Kolkata 2005.
• H. Ghosh and S. Chaudhury. Distributed and Reactive Query Planning in R-MAGIC: An Agent based Multimedia Retrieval System. IEEE Trans KDE, 16(9), Sep 2004.
• H. Ghosh, N. Rajarathnam and S. Chaudhury. Knowledge Representation for Web based Services in a Multi-cultural Environment. IEEE International Workshop on Website Evolution (WSE-2001), Florence, Nov 2001.