Sharing knowledge in digital ecosystems using semantic multimedia big data

Abstract

The use of formal representations has a basic importance in the era of big data. This need is more evident in the context of multimedia big data due to the intrinsic complexity of this type of data. Furthermore, the relationships between objects should be clearly expressed and formalized to give the right meaning to the correlation of data. For this reason the design of formal models to represent and manage information is a necessary task to implement intelligent information systems. Approaches based on the semantic web need to improve the data models that are the basis for implementing big data applications. Using these models, data and information visualization becomes an intrinsic and strategic task for the analysis and exploration of multimedia Big Data. In this article we propose the use of a semantic approach to formalize the structure of a multimedia Big Data model. Moreover, the identification of multimodal features to represent concepts and linguistic-semantic properties to relate them is an effective way to bridge the gap between target semantic classes and low-level multimedia descriptors. The proposed model has been implemented in a NoSQL graph database populated by different knowledge sources. We explore a visualization strategy of this large knowledge base and we present and discuss a case study for sharing information represented by our model according to a peer-to-peer(P2P) architecture. In this digital ecosystem, agents (e.g. machines, intelligent systems, robots,..) act like interconnected peers exchanging and delivering knowledge with each other.