TRIPOD Concept ontology experimental report
| Author | Alistair J. Edwardes (primary author), Ross S. Purves, Simone Bircher and, Christian Matyas |
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| Project | TRIPOD |
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| Published | December 6, 2007 |
| Copyright | Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme (2002- 2006) under GA nr. 045335 |
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Abstract
This report details work carried out in the first year of the Tripod project to develop a concept ontology which is foreseen in the Description of Work, along with the toponym ontology, as being a key tool in the assignment of metadata to legacy captioned images, or images with an associated set of coordinates. Furthermore, the concept ontology is intended to enable improved image search, through enhancing the derivation of relevant metadata for images in differing contexts. The deliverable is divided into two main parts: firstly a literature review in which we explore how images and place are described and consider how existing research can be used in the construction of a concept ontology. In the second part of the deliverable a number of empirical experiments, to mine captions of existing images and elicit descriptions through participant experiments are described, which together with the literature review are used to form the foundations of the concept ontology. The literature review focussed on research from a number of domains, and aimed to identify ways in which not only images, but locations are described. Previous research in information science demonstrated the importance of the so-called where facet – that is to say information relating in some way to the location of a picture in its description. We linked this idea to the notion of place in geography and environmental psychology, which effectively compounds objective properties of a location (for example, steep, forested slopes) with subjective, affective qualities associated with a place (for example, dark, gloomy, cold forest). In describing place, a number of distinct facets which relate to different aspects of the objective and subjective description of a place appear to be important – we identified a set of facets which are physical (e.g. forest, tree, wall), functional (e.g. skiing, farming, walking) and qualities (e.g. red, warm, frightening, high). Having identified these facets, we also explored how previous research had set out to categorise dimensions of these facets. The terms associated with facets can be considered to be molecular – that is they are the parts which put together form a description. However, it is clear that not every place need be associated with every possible dimension of our three facets. This is reflected in previous research on scene types or basic levels, which attempts to identify the most cognitively efficient categorisation of a scene – that is to say a category must not only allow us to discriminate between different scenes, but we wish to minimise the number of categories necessary to describe scenes. In the final part of the literature review we explore different ways of representing the semantics of, and relationships between, such concepts within, for example, taxonomies and formal ontologies. The main outcome of this part of the work was an initial definition of the framework for structuring concepts within the Tripod project. Figure E1 shows the basic structure developed. The model works on four levels, the uppermost being a faceted meta model of place, where concepts are clustered according to scene types and their three facets, activities, elements and qualities. The second level consists of the main database of concepts, organised in different types of controlled vocabularies ranging from a sophisticated thesaurus structure for scene elements to simple lists of adjectives to describing the qualities of scene. The third and fourth layers provide the connection to spatial data through knowledge about the relationships between spatial data and the concepts.
Authors
- Alistair J. Edwardes (primary author) (a)
- Ross S. Purves (a)
- Simone Bircher (a)
- Christian Matyas (b)
(a) University of Zurich, (b) University of Bamberg
Citations
Categories
Links
Link to the Deliverable http://tripod.shef.ac.uk/outcomes/public_deliverables/Tripod_D1.4.pdf
Project Home page http://tripod.shef.ac.uk/
