Metadata: The keys to the kingdom
Jun 7, 2006 1:38 PM, Transition to Digital e-newsletter
One language
Without integrated, consistent, interoperable metadata, ubiquitous, transparent digital audio and video content distribution and consumption may never become a reality for broadcasters. With all its flaws, the Internet does at least provide a means for finding and consuming information.
For large collections, automated generation of metadata will ease the tedious task of manually cataloging volumes of material. Systems that use speech recognition and closed captioning analysis are emerging. Somewhere in the future, video feature extraction will mature to the point of commercial implementation. Intelligent recommender systems will use this metadata to track user preferences and suggest the evening’s entertainment.
Metadata must be persistent. It must not be lost during any phase of the content’s lifecycle. Interoperability is mandatory, since there is no one format that covers all phases. Lose the metadata and you’ve lost the content. Who will remember where something is by its location on a drive in a file structure in five years!
The protection of rights must be maintained for content, but balanced with the ability to locate and preview. What good is rock solid content protection if no one can find your content to download?
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
