The objective of this special issue is to collect and report on recent work that aims at narrowing the large disparity between the low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness of subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual data. It represents a step towards bridging the gap between research cultures at extreme ends of the semantic multimedia spectrum. At one end, the semantic web and its supporting

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... logies are becoming established in both the open data environment and within specialist domains, such as corporate intranet search, e-Science (particularly life sciences), and cultural heritage. To facilitate the world-wide sharing of media, W3C is developing standard ways of denoting fragments of audiovisual content and of specifying and associating semantics with these. At the other end of the spectrum, media analysis tools continue to grow in sophistication, identifying features that can then be associated with explicit Multimed Tools Appl (2010) 49:1-5