Abstract
The Semantic Web is the vision of the next-generation World Wide Web in which the meaning of content, such as photographs, is made understandable to machines. The underlying new technology enables, e.g., the creation of more intelligent content-based information retrieval systems on the Web and in stand-alone applications.

In this presentation a practical application of Semantic Web techniques to the image database of the Helsinki University Museum is presented and demonstrated. From the end-user's viewpoint, the application combines the benefits of view-based search with the idea of ontological reasoning and ‘semantic browsing’, where the system recommends semantic links from a photograph to other semantically related photographs (e.g. from a photo depicting a person to photographs of her/his relatives).

Eero Hyvonen, is Professor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science.