The MPEG-7 Standard: Multimedia Description in Theory and Application

摘要

Allowing the description of the structure of documents has been one of the key factors for the success of the hypertext markup language (HTML) family of markup languages. This capability has motivated the phenomenon that has become known as the World Wide Web (the "Web")- The next generation of the Web, known as the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001), aims at describing the meaning rather than the structure of data, adding more intelligent search, retrieval, and other agent functionalities to the Web, and tools that make the implementation of this Semantic Web possible are greatly needed. The increasing availability of multimedia on the World Wide Web makes metadata description efforts for multimedia a pressing need, yet with the volume of content being created, often only a rudimentary description of the multimedia content is available. In addition, the digital mode entails a host of other descriptive needs, such as the format, factors such as compression and transmission, and issues such as copyright restrictions and terms for usage. Thus, new and efficient ways of describing multimedia content and meaning are needed as well as a structure that is capable of carrying such descriptions.