A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for multimodal cross-vocabulary mapping. A corpus of multimodal content is annotated simultaneously using annotations from a plurality of vocabularies to form a set of common annotations. Relationships between a first vocabulary associated with a first modality and a second vocabulary associated with a second modality are identified using the set of common annotations to form a multimodal vocabulary mapping. Items in the first vocabulary associated with the first modality are mapped to items in the second vocabulary associated with the second modality using the multimodal vocabulary mapping.