The International Workshop on Ontologies for Multimedia Interpretation and Retrieval (OMIR 2010) is hosted by the 5th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT 2010) which will take place on December 1-3, 2010 in Saarbruecken, Germany.

Description of the workshop:

One of the challenging issues in the field of multimedia analysis is to extract high-level semantics from a document. As opposed to the domain of analysis and indexing of textual documents, the visual domain has to face the important challenge of matching human interpretations of image information with the numerical image signature derivable by a computer, defined as the semantic gap problem.

Bridging the semantic gap, which is still an open issue, has spurred continued interest recently, in particular concerning the explicit representations of a priori knowledge (high level semantics). In many domains, ontologies are gradually being accepted as the key technology to describe the semantics of information. In the multimedia domain, they have shown to be a promising solution for making semantics explicit : they overcome the problem of representing implicit and hidden visual knowledge and they can be used as a common reference to exchange semantic contents. As a consequence, many multimedia ontologies have been recently built either to assist multimedia search and retrieval or to navigate in large multimedia collections. These ontologies are usually only hierarchically structured multimedia concept lexicons (or thesauri), rarely used as formal models that support different kinds of reasoning (through description logics) or engineering operations (ontology building, ontology mapping, ontology evolution and dynamics, modularization, etc.).

Although an integral part of other research fields, such as text or speech analysis, the full exploitation of ontologies for multimedia analysis is still largely unexplored. The goal of this workshop is to gather three communities of researchers working in close, yet quite disconnected areas, related to semantic image interpretation:

1. Image annotation and retrieval,
2. knowledge-based image analysis,
3. ontological engineering and reasoning including fundamental work on description logics or conceptual graphs.

Selected papers will appear in a special issue of the "Applied Ontology" journal.

Workshop organizers: * Céline Hudelot, MAS Laboratory, Ecole Centrale Paris, France * Konstantin Todorov, MAS Laboratory, Ecole Centrale Paris, France * Hervé Le Borgne, Vision and Content Engineering Laboratory, CEA – LIST, France Program Committee: * Jamal Atif, IRD Guiana, France * Marco Bertini, University of Florence, Italy * Alain Boucher, Institut de la Francophonie pour l'Informatique (IFI-AUF), Vietnam * Isabelle Bloch, Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France * Marine Campedel, Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France * Jérôme David, INRIA Grenoble, France * Stamatia Dasiopoulou, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Thermi-Thessaloniki, Greece * Bertrand Delezoide, CEA LIST Paris, France * Jérôme Euzenat, INRIA Grenoble, France * Peter Geibel, Technical University of Berlin, Germany * Laura Hollink, Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands * Xian-Sheng Hua, Internet Media Group, Microsoft Research Asia, China * Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany * Henning Müller, SIM, Hôpitaux universitaires de Genève, Switzerland * Ekaterina Ovchinnikova begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, USA * Adrian Popescu, Telecom Bretagne, France * Cees Snoek, Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands * Umberto Straccia, ISTI–CNR, Italy * Tonio Wandmacher, CEA Paris, France