In this paper, we consider the problem of query answering over large multimedia ontologies. Traditional reasoning systems may have problems to deal with large amounts of expressive ontological data (terminological as well as assertional data) that usually must be kept in main memory. We propose to overcome this problem with a new so-called filter and refine paradigm for ontology-based query answering. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) For both steps, algorithms are presented. (2) We evaluate our approach on real world multimedia ontologies from the BOEMIE project1 .