Integrating multimedia metadata management systems

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 record, analyze and exchange data. Collaboration between members of the MUSCLE network, an EU project, aims to examine the difficulties in extracting and integrating multi-dimensional metadata from different sources and modes and to achieve a better understanding of the semantic models used within our different projects. This article describes the similarities and differences between four independent projects and discusses three levels of integration (syntactic, feature-level semantics and domain semantics). An example scenario is presented to illustrate potential applications of the integrated systems.