SPECIAL ISSUE ON Multimedia Semantic Computing

International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM)

Guest Editors:
Chengcui Zhang, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Hongli Luo, Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA
Min Chen, University of Montana, USA

INTRODUCTION:

Recent advances in storage, hardware, information technology, communication and 
networking have resulted in a large amount of multimedia data, such as image, 
audio and video. Multimedia data is used in a wide range of applications of 
entertainment, digital libraries, health care, and distant learning. Efficient 
methods to extract knowledge from multimedia content have attracted the 
interests of a large research community. The volume of multimedia data presents 
great challenges in data analysis, indexing, retrieval, distribution and 
management. The increasing popularity of mobile device, such as smart phones, 
PDA, has demands for pervasive multimedia service which can adapt video 
contents to match users preferences. New research trends such as semantic 
computing, multi-modality interaction and cross-mining, cooperative processing, 
new multimedia standard (e.g., MPEG-21), Quality of Service (QoS), and security 
social networking provide both challenges and opportunities for multimedia 
research.

Semantic computing can be defined as Computing with (Machine processable) 
Description of Content and Intentions. Semantic technique can be used to 
extract the content of multimedia, texts, services, and structured data. The 
scope of semantic computing is now extended to many domains and applications 
such as information retrieval, knowledge management, natural language 
processing and data mining. Semantic can enrich the methods of multimedia 
research and brings new research area in multimedia semantic computing.

Multimedia semantic computing is the application of semantic computing to 
multimedia data. Researches in multimedia application can exploit the richness 
of semantic to enhance the performances of services. The understanding of 
multimedia data at the semantic level can bring new research methods to various 
domains of multimedia applications such as signal processing, content-based 
retrieval, and data mining. The application of semantic computing to multimedia 
is further motivated by the human-computer interaction in multimedia 
management. The convergence of semantic and multimedia facilitates the 
management, use and understanding of data in traditional multimedia 
applications such as multimedia analysis, indexing, annotation, retrieval, 
delivery and management.

While multimedia semantic computing changes the multimedia application and 
service via semantic concepts, several issues related to semantic modeling and 
visual analysis still remain challenging. One of the major challenging research 
topics is how to bridge the gap between low-level features of multimedia data 
and the high-level meanings of multimedia contents. Low-level features such as 
color, texture and shape can be automatically extracted from the multimedia 
data. How to model the semantic concepts based on the low-level feature is the 
prerequisite for multimedia analysis and indexing. The high-level semantic 
concepts of multimedia data can facilitate content-based applications, for 
example, image/video classification, retrieval of image and event of particular 
interest in the video. Semantic features can also be integrated with other 
techniques, such as user relevance feedback, annotations, multimodalities and 
metadata management, to efficiently and effectively retrieve the multimedia 
data.

The emerging pervasive multimedia computing applications deliver and present 
data to mobile users. Rich semantic of multimedia data can be exploited in 
context-aware computing application to provide personalized services. The 
provision of the data is envisioned to be adaptive to the location, time, 
devices and user preferences. Challenges related to this issue include the 
representation of context of multimedia data using semantic concepts, semantic 
user interface, and personalization for interface with multimedia data.

OBJECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE:

The goal of this special issue is to show some of the current research in the 
area of multimedia semantic computing. To this aim, we will bring together a 
number of high-quality and relevant papers that discuss the state-of-the-art 
research on semantic-based multimedia systems, present theoretic framework and 
practical implementations, and identify challenges and open issues in 
multimedia semantic modeling and integration. The special issue calls for 
research in various domains and applications, including pervasive multimedia 
computing systems, personalized multimedia information retrieval systems which 
adapt to the user's needs, integration of semantic content and schema from 
distributed multimedia sources so that the user sees a unified view of 
heterogeneous data, clustering and classification of semantically tied 
information in different multimedia modalities, security issues in 
multimedia/hypertext systems, and so forth. We hope this special issue will 
show a broad picture of the emerging semantic multimedia research.

RECOMMENDED TOPICS:

Topics to be discussed in this special issue include (but are not limited to) 
the following:

 	 Distributed multimedia systems
 	 Human-centered multimedia computing
 	 Image/video/audio databases
 	 Mobile multimedia computing
 	 Multimedia assurance and security
 	 Multimedia data mining
 	 Multimedia data modeling
 	 Multimedia data storage
 	 Multimedia data visualization
 	 Multimedia retrieval (image, video, audio, etc.)
 	 Multimedia streaming and networking
 	 Multimodal data analysis and interaction
 	 Novel applications, such as biomedical multimedia computing and 
multimedia forensics
 	 Semantic content analysis
 	 Semantic integration and meta-modeling
 	 Social network analysis from a multimedia perspective

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this special 
theme issue on Multimedia Semantic Computing on or before October 18, 2010. All 
submissions must be original and may not be under review by another 
publication. INTERESTED AUTHORS SHOULD CONSULT THE JOURNALS GUIDELINES FOR 
MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS at 
http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guidelines submission.pdf. 
All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind, peer review basis. 
Papers must follow APA style for reference citations.

ABOUT International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management 
(IJMDEM):

The primary objective of the International Journal of Multimedia Data 
Engineering and Management (IJMDEM) is to promote and advance multimedia 
research from different aspects in multimedia data engineering and management. 
It provides a forum for university researchers, scientists, industry 
professionals, software engineers and graduate students who need to be become 
acquainted with new theories, algorithms, and technologies in multimedia 
engineering, and to all those who wish to gain a detailed technical 
understanding of what multimedia engineering involves. Novel and fundamental 
theories, algorithms, technologies, and applications will be published to 
support this mission.

This journal is an official publication of the Information Resources Management 
Association
www.igi-global.com/ijmdem

Editor-in-Chief: Shu-Ching Chen
Published: Quarterly (both in Print and Electronic form)

PUBLISHER:
The International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management 
(IJMDEM) is published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of 
the Information Science Reference (formerly Idea Group Reference) and Medical 
Information Science Reference imprints. For additional information regarding 
the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com.

All submissions should be directed to the attention of:

Chengcui Zhang
Guest Editor
International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management
E-mail: zhang@cis.uab.edu