Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...
Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...
Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...
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Semant c <strong>Web</strong> <strong>of</strong> Language Eng neer ng<br />
for annotation; (3) <strong>the</strong> management <strong>of</strong> ontological tiers, which can be annotated<br />
with language pr<strong>of</strong>ile terms and, <strong>the</strong>refore, corresponding ontological terms; and<br />
(4) storing OntoELAN annotation documents in XML format based on multimedia<br />
and domain ontologies. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is <strong>the</strong> first audio/video<br />
annotation tool in <strong>the</strong> linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based<br />
annotation. It is expected that <strong>the</strong> availability <strong>of</strong> such a tool will greatly facilitate<br />
<strong>the</strong> creation <strong>of</strong> linguistic multimedia repositories as islands <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> <strong>Semantic</strong> <strong>Web</strong><br />
<strong>of</strong> language engineering.<br />
Introduction<br />
The <strong>Semantic</strong> <strong>Web</strong> (Lu, Dong, & Fotouhi, 2002; Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila,<br />
2001) is <strong>the</strong> next-generation <strong>Web</strong>, in which information is structured with well-defined<br />
semantics, enabling better cooperation <strong>of</strong> machine and human effort. The <strong>Semantic</strong><br />
<strong>Web</strong> is not a replacement, but an extension <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> current <strong>Web</strong>, and its development<br />
greatly relies on <strong>the</strong> availability <strong>of</strong> ontologies and powerful annotation tools.<br />
Ontology development and annotation management are two challenges <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong><br />
development <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> <strong>Semantic</strong> <strong>Web</strong>, as we discussed in Chebotko, Lu, and Fotouhi<br />
(2004). In this chapter, although we use our developed general multimedia ontology<br />
as <strong>the</strong> framework and <strong>the</strong> GOLD ontology developed at <strong>the</strong> University <strong>of</strong> Arizona<br />
as an ontology example for ontology-based annotation <strong>of</strong> linguistic multimedia<br />
data, our focus will be on addressing <strong>the</strong> second challenge — <strong>the</strong> development<br />
<strong>of</strong> an ontology-based multimedia annotator OntoELAN for <strong>the</strong> <strong>Semantic</strong> <strong>Web</strong> <strong>of</strong><br />
language engineering.<br />
Recently, <strong>the</strong>re is an increasing interest and effort for preserving and documenting<br />
endangered languages (Lu et al., 2004; The National Science Foundation, 2004).<br />
Many languages are in serious danger <strong>of</strong> being lost, and if nothing is done to prevent<br />
it, half <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> world’s approximately 6,500 languages will disappear in <strong>the</strong> next 100<br />
years. The death <strong>of</strong> a language entails <strong>the</strong> loss <strong>of</strong> a community’s traditional culture,<br />
for <strong>the</strong> language is a unique vehicle for its traditions and culture.<br />
In <strong>the</strong> linguistic domain, many language data are collected as audio and video recordings,<br />
which impose a challenge to document indexing and retrieval. Annotation<br />
<strong>of</strong> multimedia data provides an opportunity for making <strong>the</strong> semantics explicit and<br />
facilitates <strong>the</strong> searching <strong>of</strong> multimedia documents. However, different annotators<br />
might use different vocabulary to annotate multimedia, which causes low recall<br />
and precision in search and retrieval. In this article, we propose an ontology-based<br />
annotation approach, in which a linguistic ontology is used so that <strong>the</strong> terms and<br />
<strong>the</strong>ir relationships are formally defined. In this way, annotators will use <strong>the</strong> same<br />
vocabulary to annotate multimedia, so that ontology-driven search engines will<br />
retrieve multimedia data with greater recall and precision. We believe that even<br />
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