This chapter examines current trends and future perspectives of semantically enhanced media/multimedia, considering all forms of non-linear storytelling, sharing, and authoring. Background is presented providing basic definitions, involved technology, achieved progress, and limitations. Recommendations and future research directions are then stated, aiming at serving a two-fold target: firstly, to present new, user-friendly forms of collaborative creativity, multimedia authoring, and storytelling; secondly, to suggest innovative adaptation mechanisms that can be utilized in both the media production and consumption ends. A semantically enhanced media authoring model is proposed, integrating most of the expected progress in augmented user interaction and the upcoming Web 2.0/3.0 services. The targeted Semantically-enhanced Multimedia Storytelling Services aim at engaging audience members individually, validating their involvement and positively reinforcing personal participation in the narration. Thus, the importance of the topic toward the transition to the Web 3.0 era is revealed.
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The rapid evolution of digital technology, among others, has revolutionized multimodal content production and distribution processes, propelling novel mediated communication services. Interactive media authoring and sharing technologies are currently being launched, bringing forward new ways of audiovisual (AV) content exchange. Web documentaries (web-docs) and hypermedia have appeared as a natural extension of filmed documentaries and digital TV, inheriting also some of their advantages. Narrative documentaries adopt AV mediated communication mechanisms that humans have been accustomed to be informed and communicate with each other, so that they are more informative and vivid compared with other documents (books, web-pages, multimedia, etc.). Thus, AV-documentaries, web-docs and generally interactive videos and hypermedia can be more easily distributed and attended from most ages and social groups (Dimoulas, Veglis, & Kalliris, 2015; Dimoulas, Kalliris, Chatzara, Tsipas, & Papanikolaou, 2014a; Kotsakis, Kalliris & Dimoulas, 2012; Matsiola, Dimoulas, Kalliris, & Veglis, 2015; Veglis, Dimoulas & Kalliris, 2016). Moreover, the continuous evolution of the computing power and the digital storage media favor digital video production and distribution. This is also fueled by the increased network speed, the efficiency of compression algorithms and the continuous decrease of the corresponding costs (Kotsakis et al., 2012; Dimoulas, Kalliris & Veglis, 2014b). High quality AV capturing equipment is currently available at low cost and size as part of smart phones and other mobile computing terminals with inherent networking capabilities, allowing easy AV-content production, contribution and sharing (Atzori, Delgado & Giusto, 2012; Dimoulas & Symeonidis,2015;Dimoulas et al., 2014a; 2014b; 2015; Sidiropoulos, Konstantinidis, Kotsakis & Veglis, 2015; Veglis et al. 2016; Vrysis, Tsipas, Dimoulas & Papanikolaou, 2015). In this context, more and more users are involved in the AV production and consumption chain, so that creative experience and AV media culture are cultivated. Nevertheless, AV media related achievements are still far from the progress that has been made in textual information management during the outspread of social media and Web 2.0 services.