Title: First workshop on Semantic Web Annotations for Multimedia (SWAMM 2006) Organizers: Giorgos Stamou (NTUA) Jacco van Ossenbruggen (CWI) Description: The multimedia community has a long tradition in annotating multimedia assets, a tradition that predates the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web community, on the other hand, has more experience in developing generic languages and tools based on an explicit and formally defined semantics. In theory, the combination should be ideal: the Semantic Web could be significantly enriched by converting existing annotations and vocabularies to RDF or OWL, and multimedia applications could benefit from extra functionality offered by Semantic Web languages and tools. In practice, however, much work still needs to be done. This workshop invites contributions on all topics related to annotating multimedia assets using Semantic Web languages and tools. These topics include, but are not limited to: * Vocabularies / languages / models for describing multimedia assets - Multimedia ontologies - Standards: MPEG-7, VRA, IPTC, EXIF, AAT, etc. - Combining different vocabularies - Interoperability between RDF and non-RDF metadata - Flickr/del.icio.us tags / Microformats - Multimedia extensions of Semantic Web languages/ Multimedia datatypes * Tools for describing / processing multimedia assets - Image, audio and/or video annotation tools - Automatic and semi automatic annotation tools: from feature extraction to semantics - Extracting metadata from context (GPS, diary, camera devices, etc.) - Using media semantics in search, presentation and other processing Applications / Experiences / Feedback - Multimedia portals based on Semantic Web technology - Practical experiences, lessons learned and best practices for annotation on the Semantic Web - Added value of using RDF/OWL semantics in real life multimedia applications Expected outcome: The workshop is expected to: - bring together the various communities involved - provide an overview of the state of the art in the field - provide a list of open problems/promising directions/research agenda - determine and prioritize potential work that needs to be done within future W3C working groups (for example, as a follow up on the work done by the Multimedia Task force of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group). Timing & Venue: The organizers believe the WWW Conference venue and Spring 2006 time frame is perfect for this workshop because: - WWW conferences attract attendees from all target audiences. Multimedia, Semantic Web and Digital Library researchers typically do not attend each other's conferences - this conference is one of the exceptions to the rule - A flurry of large (European) research projects has started on this topic, so there is sufficient ongoing research that can be submitted to the workshop - The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group is charted to end in February 2006, so this is a good time to think about follow up work that needs to be done, within or outside W3C. Workshop registration and submissions: Potential workshop participants will be required to submit a short position paper to be invited to the workshop. This will allow the workshop organizers to determine which topics to schedule on the agenda. The barrier to attend the workshop is intended to be as low as possible, but the organizers reserve the freedom to have a cut-off in the number of participants to keep the workshop manageable and productive. The presentations during the workshop will be fewer than the number of participants to leave time for discussion amongst the different fields. The presentations will be selected based on the quality of the submissions. Organizers' qualifications: Giorgos Stamou is a research assistant professor at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens. He is leading the Knowledge Technologies and Multimedia Annotation team of Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory. His research interest include knowledge representation and reasoning, multimedia content archiving and retrieval. He has published more than 90 papers in scientific journals, conferences and books and co-edited the book Multimedia Content and the Semantic Web: Methods, Standards and Tools, Wiley, 2005. He is member of the RuleML Steering Committee, also co-chairing the Fuzzy RuleML Technical Group, W3C Advisory Committee Representative of NTUA, member of the SWBPD Working Group and co-chair of the Multimedia Task Force and member of the Steering Committee of the e-business forum on Emerging Information Technologies and Cultural Heritage of the Greek Ministry of Culture. Jacco van Ossenbruggen is a senior researcher at CWI in Amsterdam. His research interests include media semantics and automatic generation of web-based presentations. He has published several papers in the WWW conference series, served on WWW PC and panels, and co-organized the WWW9 workshop "Multimedia on the Web". He was a member of the W3C SYMM Working Group during the development of SMIL 1.0 and 2.0 and is currently a member of the W3C SWBPD Working Group where he coordinates the Multimedia Task Force with Giorgos Stamou and Jeff Pan. Publication of submissions: Giorgos and Jeff are in discussions with Carol Goble about publishing selected papers in the Journal of Web Semantics. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaleditorialboard.cws_home/671322/editorialboard#editorialboard Other potential journals include: - Int. Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems http://www.idea-group.com/journals/details.asp?id=4625 - Journal of Digital Information http://jodi.tamu.edu/