Semantic Annotation and Retrieval of Digital Photos

Nowadays research and development activities are accompanied by an increasing focus on future user needs in the field of multimedia retrieval. The fast growing of multimedia data repositories is an undeniable fact, so specialized tools allowing storage, indexing and retrieval of multimedia content have to be developed, and in addition easy-to-use content exchange is needed. The transition from text to photo retrieval raises the necessity of generating, storing and visualizing additional meta-information about the content to allow semantic retrieval. "Caliph & Emir", a pair of prototypes allowing semantic annotation and retrieval of digital photos , are presented as a possible new way of handling semantics in descriptions of multimedia data.