"The main purpose of the present project is to provide a solution for the efficient semantic-oriented multimedia information retrieval with the support of both the traditional multimedia indexing and classification techniques (based on processing the multimedia content itself) and the modern semantic Web technologies (oriented to exploring the associated multimedia metadata). The challenge proposed by these research objectives concerns a solution for the problem of bridging the “semantic gap” between low-level multimedia features and high-level concepts describing the content. The various metadata types situated in this interval will be organized into a three layers structured collection: generic metadata, valid for all multimedia types; media-specific metadata; semantic metadata for describing the multimedia objects content with the support of various specific vocabularies and ontologies. Supplementary semantic information will be managed through a knowledge database. Aiming to integrate the existing heterogeneous set of automatic indexation and classification algorithms, a structured algorithms collection will be defined and developed. A generic interface for the algorithms will be adopted, where their input/output data, as well as their preconditions and effects will be correlated with the structured metadata collection. Alongside to searching into metadata collection, three issues will be considered when providing results to the user complex queries: to process the query, to define the algorithms sequences in order to be successively applied for indexing the multimedia content, and to use the information provided by the knowledge database. For gaining an user-centered dimension, our approach will define and develop an user profile expressing his long-term interests and his current activity goals in terms of multimedia structured metadata. The profile will be considered for refining the user query’s results and to provide him with personalized recommendations."