Emergent Semantics

Definition:Emergent semantics deals with discovering and managing a media object’s set of context and high-level descriptor pairs.

In the past, multimedia documents were described to users via various sorts of textual descriptors. Librarians described these documents using various structured languages, hoping to convey their contents accurately to users. Over time, more and more researchers became of the opinion that there were more to images (and, by extension, to other forms of media), than could be described by short descriptors in some formal text-based language. They believed that by extracting various content-based descriptors, they could somehow convey automatically the complete nature of media contents in an objective fashion. They lost sight of the fact that media objects may not have a unique, objective nature, and that, even if they did possess such a nature, discovering it would be very difficult. Media objects, after all, also evoke emotions in people and this goes a long...