According to the emerging MPEG-7 standard, the semantic description of multimedia documents is expressed in terms of semantic entities such as objects, events, concepts, and relations among them. The semantic entities can be used as index terms, in order to support the semantic search process. In this paper, we propose a method that (a) applies fuzzy relational operations (closure, composition) and fuzzy rules to expand a semantic encyclopedia and (b) uses the encyclopedia to associate the semantic entities with the aid of a fuzzy thesaurus. This method is shown to reduce the need for human intervention in creating semantic descriptions of multimedia documents, as well as correct for incompleteness and inconsistency.