Image Annotation on the Semantic Web

A week ago the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has published their first public working draft of "Image Annotation and Semantic Web":

The goals of this document are (i) to explain what the advantages are of using Semantic Web languages and technologies for the creation, storage, manipulation, interchange and processing of image metadata, and (ii) to provide guidelines for doing so. The document gives a number of use cases that illustrate ways to exploit Semantic Web technologies for image annotation, an overview of RDF and OWL vocabularies developed for this task and an overview of relevant tools.

The document surely needs a lot more work (I was surprised that XMP isn't even mentioned) but is already a valuable resource. I especially liked the Tools Overview where I found jpegRDF, a java tool that can add, extract, query, and augment RDF embedded in JPEG images. Seems not to be industrial strength yet, but its open source and surely a good starting point.

A while we're talking about W3C news: The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of RIF Use Cases and Requirements