News from the Video Media Annotations front

More and more multimedia objects (images, videos, music) are available on the Web. A key for accessing these objects (e.g. in a search engine) is to master the variety of metadata about the author of a media object, its creation date, keywords, etc. If today you search for the newest video by your most favorite director on a specific topic, you will have a hard time getting what you want. The outcome of the Media Annotations Working Group will help to make your life much easier!

The group is looking into a lot of (!) metadata formats for media on the web: EXIF, ID3, MediaRDF, MPEG-7, XMP, etc. As part of an "Ontology for Media Objects", the group is defining a small set of commonly shared properties - the "Dublin Core of Multimedia".

In addition, the group is working on an API for accessing these properties, independent of the underlying metadata format. The API uses the ontology, that is the mappings between the common properties and existing formats. In that way, you will be able to get the author, creation date or keyword information of a media object, across images, videos and audio files of all kinds. Life can be so easy ...

Please have a look at the current version of the mappings and provide feedback to the working group. Getting your input and reaching consensus with developers and users of metadata formats will be a key to the success of this work.

Written by Felix Sasaki.