Image Annotation on the Semantic Web

W3C announced that the Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group has published
a report on "Image Annotation on the Semantic Web." The previously
published "Multimedia Vocabularies on the Semantic Web" discusses a
number of individual vocabularies that are relevant for image annotation.
Both publications are part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C
Members can innovate and experiment. The W3C Incubator Group Report on
Image Annotation is written for anyone with an interest in image
annotation, ranging from non-professional end-users that are annotating
their personal digital photos to professionals working with digital
pictures in image and video banks, audiovisual archives, museums,
libraries, media production and broadcast industry, etc. Many
applications that process multimedia assets make use of some form of
metadata that describe the multimedia content. The goals of this
document are to explain the advantages of using Semantic Web languages
and technologies for the creation, storage, manipulation, interchange
and processing of image metadata. In addition, it provides guidelines
for Semantic Web-based image annotation, illustrated by use cases.
Relevant RDF and OWL vocabularies are discussed, along with a short
overview of publicly available tools. The Report briefly surveys some
currently available vocabularies and tools that can be used to
semantically annotate images so that machines can better process them.
The use of Semantic Web technologies has significant advantages in
applications areas in which the interoperability of heterogeneous
metadata is important and in areas that require an explicitly defined
and formal semantics of the metadata in order to perform reasoning
tasks. Commonly accepted, widely used vocabularies for image annotation
are still missing. Having such vocabularies would help in sharing
metadata across applications and across multiple domains. Especially,
a standard means to address subregions within an image is still
missing. In addition, tool support needs to improve dramatically
before Semantic Web-based image annotation can be applied on an
industrial scale: support needs to be integrated in the entire
production and distribution chain. Finally, many existing approaches
for image metadata are not based on Semantic Web technologies, and
work is required to make these approaches interoperable with the
Semantic Web.