08251 Summary – Contextual and Social Media Understanding and Usage

Many years of multimedia research has achieved interesting results in the field of the semantic understanding of media content. Signal analysis, i.e., video, audio, image analysis has achieved some initial results to (semi-)automatically understand the semantics. However, the ability to really understand the media e.g. tell a sundown from a sunflower in an image is still difficult. It is becoming clear that “one way to resolve the semantic gap comes from sources outside of the image by integrating other sources of information” and that we should “exploit the synergy between the various media, including text and context information”. Flickr brought a new approach of communities, sharing, and tagging of photos. While tagging does not really solve the problem, it brings a new perspective of the situational usage of media, the co-presences of things and persons. Perhaps context and socio-sphere of media will bring us closer to surmounting the semantic gap. Indeed, we are now at the threshold of a new decade of contextual and social understanding of media content.