Humans think in terms of events and entities. Events provide a natural abstraction of happenings in the real world. The concept of events has a long history in foundational sciences such as philosophy and linguistics. After first developing object-based and entity-based approaches, computer science research is now addressing the concept of events and building many applications that consider events at least as important as objects. Consequently, we find many different solutions and approaches for modeling, detecting, and processing events. In addition, we find different applications that are based on events and that make use of events.

This special issue of Springer’s Multimedia Tools and Applications journal on Events in Multimedia focuses on the detection, modeling, and processing of events and applications that make use of events in the context of multimedia data. The first paper “Ice hockey shooting event modeling with mixture hidden Markov model” presents a framework for analyzing events in ice hockey videos using mixture hidden Markov model (HMM). Ice hockey videos are hard to analyze due to the homogeneity of the video material. The paper shows that mixture HMM is a suitable approach for event detection in ice hockey videos with high accuracy.

The second paper, “Event retrieval in video archives using rough set theory and partially supervised learning” presents a query-by-example approach where users provide example event shots in order to retrieve event shots from the TRECVID 2009 video data set. As a single model cannot be used for retrieval, different classifiers are combined into rules using rough set theory. Counter examples, which are necessary for applying rough set theory, do not need to be provided by the users but are compensated by applying a partially supervised learning method.

The paper “Abstracting and reasoning over ship trajectories and web data with the Simple Event Model (SEM)” aims at bridging the gap between low-level features and semantics by representing the knowledge at different level of abstraction. To this end, the Simple Event Model (SEM) is proposed and applied for situation awareness in the domain of maritime safety and security. The SEM allows representation of simple behavior events that are captured from processing low-level ship trajectory data. Further aggregation of the simple behavior events and the application of deduction rules and spatial proximity reasoning allow extraction of more abstract events.

Finally, the paper on “Unifying and targeting cultural activities via events modeling and profiling” presents a framework for aggregating, enriching, recommending, and distributing cultural events based on the users’ interests. The goal is to provide a usable recommendation platform that allows its users to access useful event information beyond mere retrieval of event information. The aggregated events are published as Linked Open Data and thus can be connected with other event sources on the web.

We thank all the authors who have contributed to this special issue of the Multimedia Tools and Applications journal by submitting their work. Our gratitude also goes to the reviewers for spending their precious time on reading the articles and providing valuable feedback to the authors. Finally, our thanks go to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Professor Borko Furht, for accepting and supporting our special issue on Events in Multimedia. Thank you for providing us the platform to present recent developments for detecting, modeling, and processing of events in multimedia and applications that make use of such events. We would also like to take the opportunity to thank the staff at Springer for their effort in putting the pieces for the special issue together and helping us in the production process. We hope that the special issue will be of benefit for the research community on Events in Multimedia.