A Metadata Model for Electronic Images

Finding images over the internet can be trying at best. Many industries such as advertising, marketing, image consultants, print media, and medical imaging deal with electronic images on a daily basis. Images are often stored by some non-descriptive ordering system and come in a variety of formats. Using image metadata, information such as the physical, technical and content related characteristics can be captured. Prior research has primarily addressed specific types of images and addressed the storage of metadata in a database format. This paper presents a Resource Description Framework Schema for the generic categorization of electronic image characteristics and traits. This schema is useful for image management and can be widely utilized in document management systems which traditionally use film and optical technology to store images. An image editor is prototyped with the capability of annotating the metadata into the image or exporting image metadata into other business oriented systems. Read entire Publication.

Constraint Scalable Vector Graphics, Accessibility and the Semantic Web

Graphics can represent concepts in a way that is easily understood. Metadata can be utilized to enable users to gain information related to the graphic and its content. For the visually impaired, the ability to access the information depicted in graphics would be an important step towards web usability.

Constraint Scalable Vector Graphics (CSVG) is an extension to SVG originally developed to provide increased flexibility in describing diagrams. CSVG provides increased capability in the form of semantic zooming, differential scaling and semantic preservation.

A research project is proposed to produce a global ontology for CSVG written in Ontology Web Language (OWL). OWL facilitates a greater degree of machine understanding, greater expressivity and greater reasoning capabilities than many other Semantic languages. The CSVG ontology will enable graphics to be annotated in varying levels of abstraction thereby allowing the graphic to be reused in other contexts. Read entire Publication.

A Privacy Component and Universal Privacy Ontology for FIPA Agent Platforms

While there is much research and development activity taking place regarding the Semantic Web, privacy is an important issue that is often overlooked. In order for the Semantic Web to become acceptable to modern society, privacy rights must be addressed. This research project will address the privacy issue by first building a Privacy Component into the foundation of agent communication, and second, creating a Universal Privacy Ontology.

The first phase of the project is to represent the framework for the Privacy Component. The Privacy Component will be incorporated into the two-layer architecture presented in Zhang, Karmouch, and Impey [5], which is proposed to add security features as the security extension to the FIPA specification. The second phase of the project is to define a Universal Privacy Ontology that will be used to create privacy policies that are both customizable and flexible. Read entire Publication.