Description
Digital multimedia devices for private usage have nowadays left their analogous counterparts behind. Our homes increasingly incorporate a digital communication infrastructure for interconnecting their various devices inside the house, and this infrastructure also gives access to external information via the Internet. Thus, we now store much of our personal information in digital form and information services like newspaper, radio, or TV are digitally available. The capacity of digital storage devices provides enormous space at affordable prices to save all this digital information into a giant personal multimedia archive; however, as is well known, the more data we store, the less information we have at our disposal. In this article, an approach to personal information management is described that is based on Semantic Web technology. In particular, the design decisions behind, and core features of OntoMedia, a software system based on a multimedia ontology that is intended for personal usage, are presented. OntoMedia supports users organizing personal multimedia archives using ontology powered metadata extraction and integration technology. The application includes a novel, easy to use graphical user interface to organize documents in categories and browse/query the semantic database.