Large-scale concept ontology for multimedia

As increasingly powerful techniques emerge for machine tagging multimedia content, it becomes ever more important to standardize the underlying vocabularies. Doing so provides interoperability and lets the multimedia community focus ongoing research on a well-defined set of semantics. This column describes a recent collaborative effort of multimedia researchers, library scientists, and end users to develop a large standardized taxonomy for describing broadcast news video. The Large-Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia (LSCOM) is the first of its kind designed to simultaneously optimize utility to facilitate end-user access, cover a large semantic space, make automated extraction feasible, and increase observability in diverse broadcast news video data sets. © 2006 IEEE.