Bootstrapping ontology evolution with multimedia information extraction

This chapter summarises the approach and main achievements of the research project BOEMIE (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction). BOEMIE introduced a new approach towards the automation of knowledge acquisition from multimedia content. In particular, it developed and demonstrated the notion of evolving multimedia ontologies, which is used for the extraction, fusion and interpretation of information from content of various media types (audio, video, images and text). BOEMIE adopted a synergistic approach that combines multimedia extraction and ontology evolution in a bootstrapping process. This process involves, on the one hand, the continuous extraction of semantic information from multimedia content in order to populate and enrich the ontologies and, on the other hand, the deployment of these ontologies to enhance the robustness of the extraction system. Thus, in addition to annotating multimedia content with semantics, the extracted knowledge is used to expand our understanding of the domain and extract even more useful knowledge. The methods and technologies developed in BOEMIE were tested in the domain of athletics, using large sets of annotated content and evaluation by domain experts. The evaluation has proved the value of the technology, which is applicable in a wide spectrum of domains that are based on multimedia content.