The RICO Model
The idea underlying the "Reusable Intelligent Content Ontology" (RICO) is the realization of so-called Intelligent Content objects (ICO) as a paradigm for self-describing objects, which are aware of their content, which know how one is supposed to deal with them and which can tell interested users under which circumstances they can be used. RICOs are influenced by the Smart Content - vision [1] which defined so-called Smart Content - objects whose structure and semantics are formally described. Additionally these objects have external interface allowing to inspect and to manipulate them. In order to realize this vision, RICO provides facilities to describe images or videos in web pages in a resource centric way; this means that all available descriptions are explicitly being assigned to the image or video. This fact is illustrated in the following Figure:
It shows a screenshot of a Flickr page displaying an image and additional
information about the image. In the center of the attention of a Flickr
page is typically an image which has been uploaded by an end user. For this
image additional information is available: at first some information related
to the content, like tags and classifications, or bibliographic (creational)
information like the title or subtitle of an image. Further there might
be additional textual descriptions created by either the author or a visitor
of the web page.
Additionally technical metadata might be available and information about
the rights and licenses to use the image. Further there might be detailed
descriptions available about parts of the image.
The RICO Ontologies
The RICO model is realized using a set of ontologies which are already used on the Web to increase semantic interoperability.
The RICO Core ontology imports several other ontologies as follows:
* The MPEG-21 DID ontology which we built to reflect the RICO data model.
* The Mindswap Digital Media ontology (Within RICO it was slightly adapted
to be in OWL-DL).
* an OWL-DL version of the FOAF ontology.
* the Annotea annotations ontology to represent annotations (The Annotea
annotations ontology available at http://www.w3.org/2000/10/ annotation-ns\#
was rebuilt in OWL-DL)
* The OWL-Lite version of the Dublin Core ontology.
* The MARCO ("Metadata for Reusable Content Objects") ontology which itself implements the MARCO Ratings, MARCO Inter
Relations and MARCO Intra Relations ontologies and reuses (parts of) the
Dublin Core Terms ontology, the Tag ontology, the Commerce vocabulary
A profile to use RICOs for images is available which additionally uses the EXIF ontology available from Kanzaki.
The RICO data model is based on MPEG-21 Digital Items, so the image and its surrounding information are available as a Digital Item. Please find some information about that in this presentation. The MPEG-21 Digital Item ontology is further briefly introduced in this report (however there the MPEG-21 DID ontology is used for a different purpose).
More information
Please have a look at the publications on my website or in the paper or presentation (an old one) about the model in the meanwhile.
Or: Contact me if you have any questions!