Schenk Simon Troncy Raphael Huet Benoit - Multimedia semantics: metadata, analysis, and interaction

This edition first published 2011

2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Troncy, Raphal.

Multimedia semantics : metadata, analysis and interaction / Raphal Troncy, Benoit Huet, Simon Schenk.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-74700-1 (cloth)

1. Multimedia systems. 2. Semantic computing. 3. Information retrieval. 4. Database searching. 5. Metadata. I. Huet, Benoit. II. Schenk, Simon. III. Title.

QA76.575.T76 2011

006.7dc22

2011001669

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9780470747001 (H/B)

ISBN: 9781119970224 (ePDF)

ISBN: 9781119970231 (oBook)

ISBN: 9781119970620 (ePub)

ISBN: 9781119970637 (mobi)

Foreword

I am delighted to see a book on multimedia semantics covering metadata, analysis, and interaction edited by three very active researchers in the field: Troncy, Huet, and Schenk. This is one of those projects that are very difficult to complete because the field is advancing rapidly in many different dimensions. At any time, you feel that many important emerging areas may not be covered well unless you see the next important conference in the field. A state of the art book remains a moving, often elusive, target. But this is only a part of the dilemma. There are two more difficult problems. First multimedia itself is like the famous fable of an elephant and blind men. Each person can only experience an aspect of the elephant and hence has only understanding of a partial problem. Interestingly, in the context of the whole problem, it is not a partial perspective, but often is a wrong perspective. The second issue is the notorious issue of the semantic gap. The concepts and abstractions in computing are based on bits, bytes, lists, arrays, images, metadata and such; but the abstractions and concepts used by human users are based on objects and events. The gap between the concepts used by computer and those used by humans is termed the semantic gap. It has been exceedingly difficult to bridge this gap. This ambitious book aims to cover this important, but difficult and rapidly advancing topic. And I am impressed that it is successful in capturing a good picture of the state of the art as it exists in early 2011. On one hand I am impressed, and on the other hand I am sure that many researchers in this field will be thankful to editors and authors for providing all this material in compact, yet comprehensible form, in one book.

The book covers aspects of multimedia from feature extraction to ontological representations to semantic search. This encyclopedic coverage of semantic multimedia is appearing at the right time. Just when we thought that it is almost impossible to find all related topics for understanding emerging multimedia systems, as discussed in use cases, this book appears. Of course, such a book can only provide breadth in a reasonable size. And I find that in covering the breadth, authors have taken care not to become so superficial that the coverage of the topic may become meaningless. This book is an excellent reference sources for anybody working in this area. As is natural, to keep such a book current in a few years, a new edition of the book has to be prepared. Hopefully, all the electronic tools may make this feasible. I would definitely love to see a new edition in a few years.

I want to particularly emphasize the closing sentence of the book: There is no single standard or format that satisfactorily covers all aspects of audiovisual content descriptions; the ideal choice depends on type of application, process and required complexity . I hope that serious efforts will start to develop such a single standard considering all rich metadata in smart phones that can be used to generate meaningful extractable, rather than human generated, tags. We, in academia, often ignore obvious and usable in favor of obscure and complex. We seem to enjoy creation of new problems more than solving challenging existing problems. Semantic multimedia is definitely a field where there is need for simple tools to use available data and information to solve rapidly growing multimedia data volumes. I hope that by pulling together all relevant material, this book will facilitate solution of such real problems.

Ramesh Jain

Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences,

Department of Computer Science Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences,

University of California, Irvine.

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