On accasion of the upcoming 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT ’09) from December 2 – 4, 2009 in GrazGraz is the second-largest city in Austria after Vienna and the capital of the federal state of Styria. It has a population of 291,890 as of 2010 (of which 258.605 have principal residence status). Graz has a long tradition as a student city: its six universities have more than 44,000 students. .../Austria, Werner Bailer from Joanneum Research gave us a short interview about state of the art in multimedia semantics.  When asked about the Multimedia and the Semantic Web he says:

There have been a number of proposals for multimedia ontologies and mappings of multimedia vocabularies (cf. the excellent report from the W3C MM Semantics XG), differing in complexity and expressivity. Thus the W3CThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the ... has chartered a working group to develop an ontology, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit ... and APIAn application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers. APIs are implemented by applications, libraries and operating systems ... for multimedia content on the Web. The group is developing a lightweight core set of metadata properties and an API specification for accessing these properties, which may come from metadata documents in different standards. Thus mappings to many relevant standards have also been specified. The set of metadata properties will be formalized for interoperability with the Semantic Web. A W3C recommendation is expected in 2010.

Read the full interview here.