The international conference on Semantics And digital Media Technologies (SAMT) targets to narrow the large disparity between the low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media - The Semantic Gap.

SAMT started out as two workshops, EWIMT 2004 and EWIMT 2005, that quickly achieved enormous success in attracting high-quality papers and over 100 participants from across Europe and beyond. In 2006 EWIMT turned into the full-fledged conference SAMT, addressing integrative research on new knowledge-based forms of digital media systems. SAMT brings together those forums, projects, institutions and individuals investigating the integration of knowledge, semantics and low-level multimedia processing, and links them with industrial research and development engineers who exploit the underlying emerging technology.

The first international conference on Semantics And digital Media Technology (SAMT 2006) took place at 6-8 December 2006, Athens, Greece, gathering 130 participants. It was hosted by the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens (IVML/NTUA), collaborating with CERTH/ITI. See www.samt2006.org

The 2nd international conference on Semantics And digital Media Technologies (SAMT 2007) was held in Genova from the 5th to the 7th December 2007, at the Jolly Hotel Marina (see samt2007.ge.imati.cnr.it) and was co-orgnized by the project AIM@SHAPE and IMATI-CNR

The third international conference on Semantics And digital Media Technologies (SAMT 2008) has been organized and hosted by the University of Koblenz, from 3rd to 5th of December 2008 (see http://samt2008.uni-koblenz.de/), in collaboration with the project SALERO, and for the first time with the SMaRT society.