Ansgar Scherp, Daniel Eißing, Carsten Saathoff

• The Multimedia Metadata Ontology (M3O) provides a generic modeling framework for representing multimedia metadata. It has been designed based on an analysis of existing metadata standards and metadata formats. The M3O abstracts from the existing metadata standards and formats and provides generic modeling solutions for annotations, decompositions, and provenance of metadata. Being a generic modeling framework, the M3O aims at integrating the existing metadata standards and metadata formats rather than replacing them. This is in particular useful as today's multimedia applications often need to combine and use more than one existing metadata standard or metadata format at the same time. However, applying and specializing the abstract and powerful M3O modeling framework in concrete application domains and integrating it with existing metadata formats and metadata standards is not always straightforward. Thus, we have developed a step-by-step alignment method that describes how to integrate existing multimedia metadata standards and metadata formats with the M3O in order to use them in a concrete application. We demonstrate our alignment method by integrating seven different existing metadata standards and metadata formats with the M3O and describe the experiences made during the integration process.