This comprehensive book draws together experts to explore how knowledge technologies can be exploited to create new multimedia applications, and how multimedia technologies can provide new contexts for the use of knowledge technologies. Thorough coverage of all relevant topics is given. The step-by-step approach guides the reader from fundamental enabling technologies of ontologies, analysis and reasoning, through to applications which have hitherto had less attention.

This book redefines community discovery in the new world of Online Social Networks and Web 2.0 applications, through real-world problems and applications in the context of the Web, pointing out the current and future challenges of the field. Particular emphasis is placed on the issues of community representation, efficiency and scalability, detection of communities in hypergraphs, such as multi-mode and multi-relational networks, characterization of social media communities and online privacy aspects of online communities. User Community Discovery is for computer scientists, data scientists, social scientists and complex systems researchers, as well as students within these disciplines, while the connections to real-world problem settings and applications makes the book appealing for engineers and practitioners in the industry, in particular those interested in the highly attractive fields of data science and big data analytics.

The rapid advancement of digital multimedia technologies has not only revolutionized the production and distribution of audiovisual content, but also created the need to efficiently analyze TV programs to enable applications for content managers and consumers. Leaving no stone unturned, TV Content Analysis: Techniques and Applications provides a detailed exploration of TV program analysis techniques.
Leading researchers and academics from around the world supply scientifically sound treatment of recent developments across the related subject areas including systems, architectures, algorithms, applications, research results, emerging approaches, and open issues. The book is organized into six parts:

1. Content Extraction - deals with automatic analysis and annotation of TV content, addressing generic semantics and concepts as well as TV content
2. Content Structuring - examines techniques for identifying interesting parts of TV programs and supplying direct access to it
3. Content Recommendation - explores the problem of providing users with the most relevant content, addressing the problem of an ever-increasing amount of available content
4. Content Quality - considers visual perception and quality approaches in the multi-display TV context and the specific mobile TV scenario
5. Web and Social TV - presents studies on Web and TV convergence and on how user-generated content in Web 2.0 applications can be used to enhance services
6. Content Production - covers postproduction, visual effects, and presentation standards

Most parts start with a chapter that provides an overview of that area, followed by state-of-the-art approaches focusing on specific issues covered in that section. Reporting on recent advances in the field, the book provides you with the global view and up-to-date understanding of emerging trends needed to participate in the development of the digital TV domain.

This book redefines community discovery in the new world of Online Social Networks and Web 2.0 applications, through real-world problems and applications in the context of the Web, pointing out the current and future challenges of the field. Particular emphasis is placed on the issues of community representation, efficiency and scalability, detection of communities in hypergraphs, such as multi-mode and multi-relational networks, characterization of social media communities and online privacy aspects of online communities. User Community Discovery is for computer scientists, data scientists, social scientists and complex systems researchers, as well as students within these disciplines, while the connections to real-world problem settings and applications makes the book appealing for engineers and practitioners in the industry, in particular those interested in the highly attractive fields of data science and big data analytics.

This comprehensive book draws together experts to explore how knowledge technologies can be exploited to create new multimedia applications, and how multimedia technologies can provide new contexts for the use of knowledge technologies. Thorough coverage of all relevant topics is given. The step-by-step approach guides the reader from fundamental enabling technologies of ontologies, analysis and reasoning, through to applications which have hitherto had less attention.

This volume contains the full and short papers of SAMT 2009, the 4th Int- national Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies 2009 held in Graz, Austria. SAMT brings together researchers dealing with a broad range of research topics related to semantic multimedia and a great diversity of application - eas. The current research shows that adding and using semantics of multimedia content is broadening its scope from search and retrieval to the complete media life cycle, from content creation to distribution and consumption, thus lever- ing new possibilities in creating, sharing and reusing multimedia content. While some of the contributions present improvements in automatic analysis and - notation methods, there is increasingly more work dealing with visualization, user interaction and collaboration. We can also observe ongoing standardization activities related to semantic multimedia in both W3C and MPEG, forming a solid basis for a wide adoption. Theconferencereceived41submissionsthisyear, ofwhichtheProgramC- mittee selected 13 full papers for oral presentation and 8 short papers for poster presentation. In addition to the scienti?c papers, the conference program - cluded two invited talks by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Stefan Rug ] er and a demo session showing results from three European projects. The day before the main conference o?ered an industry day with presen- tions and demos that showed the growing importance of semantic technologies in real-world applications as well as the research challenges coming from them."

We greeted the attendees of CIVR 2004 with the following address: "T' aimid an- ' bhroduil ' failte ' a chur romhaibh chuig Ollscoil Chathair Bhaile Atha Cliath agus ' chuig an triu ' Comhdh' ail Idirn' aisiun ' ta ar Aisghabh' ail Iomh' anna agus F' ?se' an. ' T'asuil ' againn go mbeidh am iontach agaibh anseo in Eirinn agus go mbeidh bhur gcuairt taitneamhnach agus sas ' uil. ' T' aimid an-bhroduil ' go hairithe ' failte ' a chur roimh na daoine on ' oiread sin t' ?ortha difriula ' agus na daoine a th' ainig as i bhfad i gc' ein. T'aanoireadsinpaip ' ' ear curtha isteach chuig an chomhdh' ail seo go bhfuil caighde' an na bp' aip' ear agus na bp' ostaer an-ard ar fad agus taimid ' ag s' uil go mor ' le h' ocaid iontach. " rd We were delighted to host the 3 International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval in Dublin City University. We hope that all attendees had a wonderful stay in Ireland and that their visits were enjoyable and rewarding. There were 125 papers in total submitted to the CIVR2004 conference and each was reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. We are grateful to the 64 members of the technical programme committee and the 29 other rev- wers who completed these reviews and allowed us to put together a very strong technical programme.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Semantics and Digital Media Technologies, SAMT 2006, held in Athens, Greece in December 2006.

The 17 revised full papers presented together with a invited keynote paper were carefully reviewd and selected from 68 submissions. SAMT 2006 targets to narrow the Semantic Gap', i.e. the large disparity between the low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media. The papers address a wide area of integrative research on new knowledge-based forms of digital media systems, semantics and low-level multimedia processing.