Doctoral Thesis

	A Semantic Middleware to enhance current Multimedia Retrieval Systems with Content-based functionalities
Facultad de Informática de la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV-EHU), Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain, 2011
Gorka Marcos Ortego made the oral presentation of his Ph.D.-Thesis entitled 'A Semantic Middleware to enhance current Multimedia Retrieval Systems with Content-based functionalities' supervised by Dr. Julián Flórez Esnal, Ph.D., and Dr. Arantza Illaramendi Echave. The dissertation took place on 11th May 2011 at the Computer Science Faculty of the Universidad del País Vasco. The Doctoral Examination Committee was composed by Prof. Nieves Brisaboa, Prof. Sonia Bergamaschi, Dr. Eduardo Mena, Dr. José Francisco Aldana and Dr. Jorge Posada. The thesis was graded Cum Laude. This work reviews the information retrieval theory and focuses on the revolution experimented in that field promoted by the digitalization and the widespread use of the multimedia information. After analyzing the trends and promising results in the main disciplines surrounding the content-based information retrieval field, this thesis proposes a reference model for Multimedia Information Retrieval that aims to contextualize the thesis contributions. According to this reference model, this work proposes an architecture for a component named 'Semantic Middleware' that aims to centralize the main semantic services to be provided during the indexing, storage, search, retrieval and consume of the multimedia elements. This architecture has been designed from a pragmatic point of view, aiming to facilitate the enhancement of the current systems with content-based functionalities. The architecture proposal includes a set of key design criteria for a right deployment. In order to validate this thesis, two real complementary deployments have been performed and reported in this work.