Abstract: The rapid increase in the available amount of video data is creating a growing demand for efficient methods for understanding and managing it at the semantic level. New multimedia standards, such as MPEG-4 and MPEG-7，provide the basic functionalities in order to manipulate and transmit objects and metadata. But importantly, most of the content of video data at a semantic level is out of the scope of the standards. A video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology was presented. Domain ontology was used to define high level semantic concepts and their relations in the context of the examined domain. And low-level features(e. g. visual and aural) and video content analysis algorithms were integrated into the ontology to enrich video semantic analysis.OWL was used for the ontology description. Rules in Description Logic were defined to describe how features and algorithms for video analysis should be applied according to different perception content and low-level features. Temporal Description Logic was used to describe the semantic events, and a reasoning algorithm was proposed for events detection. The proposed framework was demonstrated in a soccer video domain and shows promising results.

Key words: Ontology, Semantic content analysis, Semantic event