The result of more than 15 years of collective research, Multimedia Ontology: Representation and Applications provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the nature of media data and the principles involved in its interpretation. The book presents a unified approach to recent advances in multimedia and explains how a multimedia ontology can fill the semantic gap between concepts and the media world. It relays real-life examples of implementations in different domains to illustrate how this gap can be filled.

The book contains information that helps with building semantic, content-based search and retrieval engines and also with developing vertical application-specific search applications. It guides you in designing multimedia tools that aid in logical and conceptual organization of large amounts of multimedia data. As a practical demonstration, it showcases multimedia applications in cultural heritage preservation efforts and the creation of virtual museums.

The book describes the limitations of existing ontology techniques in semantic multimedia data processing, as well as some open problems in the representations and applications of multimedia ontology. As an antidote, it introduces new ontology representation and reasoning schemes that overcome these limitations. The long, compiled efforts reflected in Multimedia Ontology: Representation and Applications are a signpost for new achievements and developments in efficiency and accessibility in the field.