The Role of Visual Rhetoric in Semantic Multimedia: Strategies for Decision Making in Times of Crisis

Abstract

As semantic multimedia is approaching mainstream, even the great improvements that can be seen in its classic schools, like the data mining inspired Information Retrieval based on metadata analysis, or Computer Vision, might not be enough. We identify a new group that gains traction in the semantic multimedia community and which uses as starting point developments from psychology and visual communication. For the purposes of this article we restrict our domain to visual rhetoric as we consider it to yield the biggest potential for future developments. Living in times when the periods between crises seem to be shorter and shorter, we look at how developments in semantic multimedia can be used for predicting and overcoming crises. We analyze at least 2 aspects related to this: using information visualization to understand the evolution of crises and creating multi-layered semantic multimedia technologies that can easily be adapted to use a variety of sources and solve problems from different domains. In both cases we show how techniques inspired by visual rhetoric (information linking, framing, composition) in conjunction with named entity recognition offer a lot of benefits. The section related to multi-layered semantic multimedia technologies also draws on the lessons learned while designing a prototype application aimed at improving tourism decision making process. The article ends with a discussion on evaluation methods for multi-layered semantic technologies applications. We look at how to evaluate them on both levels: mechanisms (information linking versus raw named entity recognition when generating visuals, for example), and decision making strategies (Do such systems actually solve real problems related to crises, create jobs or at least can they be repurposed to solve other problems than the one with which we have started?).