MUSCLE NoE - DN2.6 - An intermediate release of the 4M infrastructure and a report explaining who is using it and how

The Internet coming and the diffusion of devices for the production of multimedia information and the diffusion of low-cost personal computer have concurred to a multimedia documents increase; however the management, search and retrieval systems have not increased at the same level, so it is important to realize a system able to oppose to some redundancy problems and to a bad efficiency of the search and retrieval operations due to the lack of multimedia documents information. In this scenario, a wide variety of systems and architectures have been developed to manage multimedia metadata for a range of purposes. Each of these systems employs different underlying semantic and syntactic models to store, analyze and exchange data. Collaboration between members of the WP2 "Evaluation, Integration and Standards" and the E-Team "Integration of structural and semantic models for multimedia metadata management" aims at examining the difficulties in extracting and integrating multi-dimensional metadata from different sources and at achieving a better understanding of the semantic models used within our different projects. This report presents the state-of-the-art of the 4M infrastructure, discussing in particular both the main technical improvements and who is using it and how.