Section: Application Domains

Bibliographic Metadata

Semantic metadata, in particular semantic annotations for multimedia documents, are at the core of the applications we are working on since several years. In the applications we developed in the previous years, mainly with INA (National Institute of Audiovisual) and FMSH (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme), we have built tools aimed at helping the manual construction of semantic annotations. In these projects, manual construction was unavoidable because semantically rich annotations, not obtainable by automatic processes, had to be built. In our current project with ABES (National Bibliographic Agency for Universities), the semantic metadata considered consists of information present in bibliographic databases and authority notices (which respectively describe documents and so-called authorities, such as authors typically). The challenge is not to build these metadata, which have been built by human specialists and already exist, but, for instance, to check their validity, to link or to merge different metadata bases.

Although not dedicated to metadata management, our formal graph-based framework allows to represent modular ontologies and rules, as well as semantic metadata and to reason with them (cf. for instance ontological query answering in 6.2 ). This framework is implemented in our software Cogui. Cogui provides several constructs (patterns, controlled interfaces, ...) to help the annotation process. One of our basic aim is now to develop and implement tools for managing and controlling semantic metadata bases (see 6.5 and 7.1 ).