Multimedia Annotations on the Semantic Web

Multimedia in all forms (images, video, graphics, music, speech) is exploding on the Web. The content needs to be annotated and indexed to enable effective search and retrieval. However, recent standards and best practices for multimedia metadata don't provide semantically rich descriptions of multimedia content. On the other hand, the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Semantic Web effort has been making great progress in advancing techniques for annotating semantics of Web resources. To bridge this gap, a new W3C task force has been created to investigate multimedia annotations on the Semantic Web. This article examines the problems of semantically annotating multimedia and describes the integration of multimedia metadata with the Semantic Web. (Editor's note by John R. Smith).