3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

Information is increasingly becoming ubiquitous and all-pervasive, with the World-Wide Web as its primary repository. The rapid growth of information on the Web creates new challenges for information retrieval. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the investigation and development of the next generation web – the Semantic Web.

Multimedia information has always been part of the Semantic Web paradigm, but, in general, has been discussed very simplistically by the Semantic Web community. We believe that, rather than trying to discover a media object’s hidden meaning, one should formulate ways of managing media objects so as to help people make more intelligent use of them. The relationship between users and media objects should be studied. Media objects should be interpreted relative to the particular goal or point-of-view of a particular user at a particular time.

Content-based descriptors are necessary to this process. At the same time, such descriptions are definitely not sufficient. Context is also important, and should be managed. The area of emergent multimedia semantics has been initiated to study the measured interactions between users and media objects, with the ultimate goal of trying to satisfy the user community by providing them with the media objects they require, based on their individual previous media interactions.

The arrival of Web 2.0 has added new paradigms to the media mix. Such concepts as folksonomies, a form of emergent semantics, introduce a collaborative, dynamic approach to the generation of ontologies and media object semantics. That such an approach results in a stable semantics, though surprising, has been recently demonstrated.

As one can see, the field of multimedia semantics is in great flux at the present time. Approaches which seek to unify these disparate disciplines are especially necessary.

This will be a one-day workshop to be held during ISM’09. Besides the standard research contributions, there will also be a poster session and a session devoted to the presentation of results from current Ph.D. students, as well as a keynote talk. Based on last year’s workshop, the keynote will include discussions of necessary research agendas which will bring together important subsets of the research communities working on multimedia semantics, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. Best papers of this workshop will be published in IEEE Multimedia.