We are delighted to welcome you to the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies held in Athens. SAMT 2006 aims to narrowthe large disparity between the low-level descr- tors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the ri- ness 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 success in attracting high-quality papers from across Europe and beyond. This year EWIMT turned into the...