Special Issue of Multimedia Systems Journal
on Canonical Processes of Media Production

Call for papers (PDF, TXT)

There is substantial support within the multimedia research community for the collection of machine-processable semantics during established media workflow practices. An essential aspect of these approaches is that a media asset gains value by the explicit association of related metadata. For example, metadata captured from a video camera, such as pan and zoom information, can be later used for the support of the editing process. In addition, a media asset can later be processed by feature analysis tools to produce further metadata, e.g. automatic object recognition, useful for search and retrieval. At some further stage, the media asset can be included in a presentation to an end user. Again, it is useful to retain the metadata related to the context of usage of the media asset.

While non-textual media can be exchanged between applications with little effort, we are not yet able to exchange these along with the related semantics in standard ways. Each application or system provides an implicit model for exchanging information that serves the functionality and process flow addressed by a particular environment or community. The situation is illustrated by the case of data formats with included metadata, such as the mov or XMP formats, where the combination of features hinders general exchange when the application does not support the features supported by the data format.

Our aim here is to establish clear interfaces for the information flow across processes among distinct production phases so that compatibility across systems from different providers can be achieved. We see this as a first step towards a longer term goal - namely, to provide agreed-upon descriptions for exchanging semantically annotated media assets among applications. We seek original contributions from the different communities that contribute to "multimedia", including feature analysis, content production, multimedia semantics and knowledge representation.

The work was initiated in a workgroup on "Multimedia for Human Communication" at a Dagstuhl seminar 05091 and then a follow-up workshop at ACM Multimedia on "Multimedia for Human Communication - From Capture to Convey".

The special issue will be based around a core article "Canonical Processes of Media Production", available from http://www.cwi.nl/~media/projects/canonical/. We envisage that this will develop through the process of creating the special issue, and welcome comments and criticisms on the current version.

In addition, the special issue will contain example papers, containing detailed descriptions of the process flow of data and metadata in (existing) applications in terms of the core model. We supply two example papers to act as inspiration for potential authors (also available http://www.cwi.nl/~media/projects/canonical/).
 

Submission Guidelines and Important Dates

Submitting authors should follow the Author Guidelines available from http://www.ifi.uio.no/MMSJ/author.html. However, manuscripts should be submitted by email to Zeljko Obrenovic.

Also note that, given the unusual character of the special issue, the page length of the contributions is expected to be around 5-8 pages (two column, single spaced, ACM/IEEE format). Initial submissions need not be in this format but should not exceed 6000 words.

We would ask authors to check through their own submission and make sure the following are included (see example papers):

Note that you do not need to repeat the motivation for identifying canonical processes in your own paper.

Important dates:

Special Issue Editors:

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